How To Build A $1 MILLION DOLLAR Personal Brand MASTERCLASS | Rory Vaden & Lewis Howes

Personal branding is transcending this influencer space. It's transcending the thought leader space. And it is becoming ubiquitous and pervasive in who gets promoted, who gets hired, who gets on the board, who gets equity, which company gets funded, even who we date.

I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. Today. We're talking about how to build a seven figure personal brand.

Yeah.

Because personal branding, I've been saying for the last year, is the only way to recession proof yourself is by having a credible personal brand, a one built on trust and a powerful reputation.

Yeah.

And I want to talk about how to build a seven figure personal brand today and beyond. And you did a big study and got a lot of data points on personal branding in general and what the general population thinks about personal branding. Do they buy more from people with personal brands? Do they believe people who have personal brands or not? And the value behind having a personal brand. So I'd love for you to dive in on some of the data points you've got, what this study is, and then we'll talk about how we can use this to build your personal brand and monetize it throughout this interview.

Yeah, so our company, so Brand Builders Group, we hired an independent research firm called the Center for Generational Kinetics to conduct an independent nationwide research study on trends in personal branding because we've been talking about and teaching people to build their personal brands. I've been on the podcast, we've talked about it before. Personal branding has been this emerging space, right? Online business, influencers, social media, all this stuff that's been really fun and exciting. But we really wanted to look at what are the actual long-term impacts and what are the trends pointing to from a data-driven perspective. And is personal branding just a thing that affects a subgroup of entrepreneurs and the small culture? or is it becoming bigger than that? Is it becoming more ubiquitous, meaning it applying to everybody? And so that's what we set out to study. How many people are a part of this study? Well, so it's a statistically valid sample that's weighted to the US census. Got it. So it has a plus or minus, I think it's like a plus or minus 3% margin of error. So it's like a completely empirically validated, you know, it's the kind of study you'll hear people talk about on CNN and all that stuff. So whatever the sample size is, you know, that they have to get it. It's more than a thousand people but weighted to the US census. So this is not an international study so we should say that but the summary is there's three main things that the data points very clearly to, okay? Number one, personal branding is the future. There are large discrepancies by generation in how personal branding affects their hiring, buying decisions, their trust decisions which we will talk about. The second big thing is that personal branding is highly profitable. Not just for your influencer and their brand deals or your online marketer friend or your coach, you know, brand builders group. We work with... You know, historically we worked with a lot of people like me and you that were Authors and speaker types, which is just the world we came from. But more and more we've seen this kind of expanding group of clients. And that's part of why we wanted to study this.

Employees to CEOs and executives and everyone in between, not just Instagram influencer.

Yeah, not, not. And I think it's like when you hear personal branding, people often think your mind kind of goes to the, the influencer, right? Kind of the lifestyle influencer. They're maybe doing brand deals, sharing products or, you know, things like that, doing sponsorships or. towards the more like thought leader expert category, which is more of what I.

Personally... Speaker, writer, coach, consultant, author, blogger.

But what personal branding really is and what we're starting to see clearly is that personal branding is simply the digitization of reputation. The digitization of reputation. So, people like you, Gary Vaynerchuk, there's this whole group of people who who saw early to go, well, I'm not exactly sure what this is, but I know it's huge.

Social media.

Social media, it's not just a fad.

Content, social media, online writing, blogs, videos.

Anything online is a part of it.

Yes.

But I think, you know, so this emerging area was like, oh yeah, there's this new, I mean, you were on the COVID of Success Magazine as one of the new thought leaders, as was Gary in several, several other online influencers. And that's kind of the term is influencers. But personal branding is becoming bigger than that. It is not just online influencer. It is reputation, which is a concept that's been around for decades, right? The average person goes, yeah, I have social media for friends, but they're not really recognizing that, oh, this is how I'm getting my jobs. This is how I'm going to get paid. This is if I'm going to get promoted.

So it's not about having, a million followers. It's about the reputation you have with the followers you have.

Yeah, and in your space and in your industry. So, for example, right? So, I've got some of this data points here pulled up so that I don't misquote them, right? So, 63% of all Americans say that they are more likely to buy from someone who has an established personal brand.

To buy from a company that has...

No, no, a person.

A person.

So, like if you have a personal brand.

If I have no personal brand, you may not buy something from me.

That's right. 63% of Americans say I'm more likely to buy from you versus some stranger whether you're selling me an information course or it's financial services or product or insurance or anything, you know, fitness or anything.

Real estate.

Real estate. It doesn't matter. We trust people people who have this thing called a personal brand. But here's the part about when we said it's the future. So it's 63% of all Americans, but in that group, okay, so there's a subset here, only 33% of boomers and only 59% of Gen Xers say they're more likely to buy from someone who has a personal brand. Which means that specifically to like boomers, It doesn't matter as much to them. It's like not that big of a deal. But if you strip them out, 76% of millennials actually are more likely to buy from someone who has an established personal brand. So this points to an inevitable trend that is saying that the older generations have viewed personal branding as like a fad, a thing that kids do. Digital online influencers, this thing I don't really understand, But the future is here. So older millennials are ages 35 to 44. These are the people with all the buying power, making all the decisions, taking over the boardrooms, scaling the companies, building.

The companies, raising money, building companies, all that stuff.

All that stuff and specifically to millennials, this stuff influences everything. Who they hire, who they work for. who they, I mean, so who they.

Follow online, who they're, yeah.

30%, okay, 30% of people say I'm more likely to date someone because they have an established personal brand.

That's reputation and credibility and trust right away.

Yeah, that's true, right? I guess you feel like you know more about the person.

Or, oh, these people are following, they have this thing and they have some testimonials, I'm more likely to trust them than someone who has none of that.

Right. Yeah, but it's just fascinating to go, oh, this is coming into our dating life, how we hire, who we spend time with.

I've never been on any of the dating apps, the Tinders and Bumbles and all that stuff, but I've heard people say like, oh, I match with someone that I know and follow online with someone I respect or trust, and they're probably more likely to message the person they know from online or they've seen online. than if they didn't know them at all.

Yeah, and that is, you know, so this is, you know, I said there were three main findings. One, this is the future. Two, it's highly profitable. Here's the third one. It's a trust accelerator. A personal brand is a trust accelerator. And that is, you go, how do you build trust? Okay, first of all, you, we trust people that we see. Right? That's why we trust celebrities, which is really funny because Like movie stars. We don't even know their real name. We don't even know who they are in real life, but we trust them.

Because we see them.

Crazy. Right?

So we trust people we see. And we see them on TV. On TV.

Or on a video.

Pretending to be someone they're not. Even if they're credible in real life.

Or not, we just trust them. Because we see them. So, and this is true in our everyday life, right? Like you trust whatever, your spouse, you trust your parents, you trust your colleagues, you trust the the person at the grocery store that you see more than the stranger walking down the street that you've gone, I've never seen this person here. So we trust people we see. We also trust people that we learn from. And we trust people who entertain us. And then we trust people who we feel like we know intimate things about. So, you know, if you made a list, if I said, okay, Louis, write down the five people you trust the most. It's probably not social media influencers. It's probably people though that really know you and that you really know. Like you know all their dirty secrets. You know their past. You also know where they like to shop, where they like to eat, what time do they wake up. And these things are, these are things that social media affords us the ability to do. To see you, to learn from you, to be entertained by you and to know you.

To know intimate things about you.

Intimate things about you, right? When I came here, one of the first things I did is I shot a little back, you know, a little video here of your studio for our fans and followers and friends, right? Because people want to know, like, what does Lewis House Studio look like? Like, it's really fascinating. And I always struggle with this because for me, I couldn't I haven't been great at social because I've not been super social. I've used it as like a broadcasting tool. And I've always thought, I mean, what could be more useless than showing people what I ate for dinner? Like, why would anybody care? And then somebody asked me, they said, well, think about this. If you had a chance to follow your celebrity crush for a day, so like who would it be for you? Like, if you had a chance to go, who would be your celebrity crush? Like, if I mean, was he younger or something? No, like right now, like someone You walked in that you were like, oh man, if I could hang out with this person.

I mean, a girl or a guy, it doesn't matter.

Not a girl, not a girl, but like a guy. The rock. So if he walked in, you'd like lose, he'd be like, this is legit.

I want to see what he's doing.

Throughout his day and yeah. Yes, so if I said, okay, Louis, I can't do this, but let's see, I said, I can give you a chance to follow the rock for an entire day. But you can't talk to him. But you're gonna be there right when he wakes up. You're gonna shadow him. You're gonna shadow him, you're gonna be in every meeting, you get to listen to every phone call, you get to be in the car, on the plane, you get to see what he eats, what he wears, what his closet looks like. Even though you couldn't talk to him.

Would you do it?

Would you? Yeah, it'd be great. Of course, it'd be fascinating, right? Well, that's how it is. People are interested in the intimate details of our life and that is where trust comes from. And that is why this social media thing is not just like a social thing, it's creating trust. reputation. And if I feel like I know you, then I can buy from you, I can hire you, I can date you, I can recommend you to other people. And that's what the data is pointing to.

Yes. And if you have recommendations from other people you trust about that person, you're more likely to hire, date and buy from.

Yeah. So this was interesting. So one of the questions that we asked people is what are the most influential factors in making a decision about people that you buy from? Okay, so for example, we asked the question, how important are each of the following when it comes to paying someone for a product or service? And we listed out all these things, because a lot of our clients at Brand Builders Group, our clients are interested in a lot of these things. A podcast, a TED Talk, a book, a YouTube. And we actually separated book into self-published book, New York Times best selling, Wall Street Journal best selling book, New York Times best selling book. None of those things matter to people.

In terms of what? What someone, what a person has.

In terms of...

If you have a book, a podcast, a blog, a...

It's not that they don't matter. They do, but not as much as you would think.

Interesting. What does matter?

What matters most, more than anything, that is going to influence whether or not a stranger buys from you. 62% of people said that they have testimonials about their work and 56%, this is of Americans, said that they are paid to consult or advise on their topic. So in other words, you have real life proof of delivering your service influences purchasing decisions more than how many followers you have. whether or not you have a book and specifically the tier of best-selling book, right? You know like you know how hard it is to become a New York Times best-selling author. It's not an easy thing to do. And a lot of time and energy goes into doing it. Well, it matters in the industry. Like you and I know that we speak that language. But the general population. No.

For the person listening to this, your customer doesn't care.

Most of them don't even know the difference between a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amazon, USA Today. They don't know the difference.

Did they see bestseller on the it's all the same.

Whatever. What they want to see is, did you help Sally Jo down the street actually get in better shape? Or did you help her you know heal her gut? Or did you help her whatever plan for retirement? They want to see real life examples. And then the other thing is it's really third party credibility. They want testimonials. They want to see proof that you've been paid. They want to see proof that you're in the media. And then actually the fourth thing was that they actually fifth was that they have a nice website. So that actually is of all of the things that's kind of more market-y and is people care.

Having a good looking personal brand website is important.

Mobile friendly, you know, loads quickly and-- Functional, not clunky.

Yeah.

But the number of followers you have.

Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter as much as you would think.

Having a million followers isn't the most important thing. It's a factor, but it may help you drive traffic somewhere, but it may not be the reason people buy.

Even older millennials, only 20% of them say if someone has a lot of followers, that's influential to me. And here's the thing too.

So what is influential for most people, having testimonials?

Yes, having testimonials is the most influential factor in somebody doing business with you. Whether it's hiring and so here's the thing, when you say having established personal brand is more likely to get you hired, it is the thing that people look at when they're hiring you, you're going to also get paid more. So we haven't talked so much about them, we haven't talked about money yet but you're actually going to make money from doing this and it's a trust accelerator. So here's another one. I know we're throwing out a lot of data points, but the reason for the data points, just to take a minute on that, is to go, the data tells a story here that is important that I don't think the world talks about or understands. We think of it as like vanity. How many followers do I have? How many likes? Who's influential? Do you know so and so? But the data tells a story here that goes, it's not about that stuff. It's about showcasing your expertise and the value you provide in the world and that people just want to see evidence of that. And that if you show that, it is significant. Not the number of followers you have. And it matters for big companies too. So this blew my mind. 82% of all Americans believe that companies are more influential if their executives have a personal brand that they can follow, that they know and follow. And this makes so much sense, right? You go Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, right? Bill Gates. There's a face, a personality that we can trust and know and relate with rather than this kind of obscure... A logo. Entity. Yeah. It's just a logo. Now, this can also work against you because if your executive, you know, does something like again, reputation. We need to think of this less as personal branding and more as building reputation. And you know, a really interesting example here recently that was in the news, fairly recent was, you know, Elon Musk smoked marijuana on the Joe Rogan podcast. And the stock went down 9% like within, you know, a matter of days. Now it has since recovered and there were some other things going on around that time, but it shows like that was such an accentuated, emphasized moment of going, people's trust is tied to the personality and the people in the business.

Which could help you accelerate the growth or if you do something wrong could hurt the company as well.

Yeah, it could decelerate. I mean, there's examples of this right on social media where it's kind of the whole cancel culture.

Absolutely, man. Affecting the business in a big way.

Yeah, in a big, big way.

Big way.

Big, big way.

What would you say are the most important elements to monetizing personal brand then? What are the important keys to monetizing once you know that Testimonials, reputation in general, having a great website, media proof are the things that will support you and kind of getting people to be willing to buy from you. What are the elements to help you monetize?

Yeah, so monetizing is interesting. So the last time that we had a personal branding conversation here on the podcast, We talked about the five ways to monetize your personal brand.

Yes.

So you may remember we call them P-A-I-D-S. Yep. So basically that's going, these are five vehicles to take a pile of followers and turn it into a pile of cash.

Yes.

So the P is a product. Okay, so you're selling a physical product, a t-shirt, right? I got followers and like, Hey, I made a t-shirt, buy my t-shirt. Or, you know, here's my mug, like buy my mug. Or a book, you know, like a physical product. Yeah, a physical product. The A is ads and affiliates. So that is I have an audience rather than selling my audience something, I'm going to sell someone else typically a brand access to my audience. All right, you've got ads, you've got sponsors for the show. So, you've got a heavy ads and affiliate model. Your YouTube videos, you've got ads, right? You make money from ads and affiliates, that's part of your model. the I is information products, which has been an explosion in recent years in terms of monetizing the personal brand because this is, they have low barriers to entry. They have high value, perceived value. So courses, membership sites, certifications, assessments.

Ebooks.

Yeah. Ebooks.

And there was, and this was hard to build these out 10 years ago. Now there's massive platforms that are allowing it to be so much easier to create a course or an e-book or certification membership site. Whereas you had to build out custom stuff 10 years ago. Now there's a whole industry around this.

Yeah, and there's lots of tools and providers and stuff. D is deals. So that is anytime there's a third party deal, a book deal, a TV deal, a licensing deal where you're basically paid for creative work. irregardless of how well it sells.

Right.

You know, like royalties usually is associated with that. But the one to highlight here is services. So services are the fastest path to cash. It's selling your time. But even the way that we thought about personal branding previous to this national research study was that services was coaching, speaking, training, consulting. which is a lot of what we've done, you've done things that we help, yeah, Brand Builders Group, we help a ton of our clients. But only about half of the clients, a little more than half of the clients do that. We're noticing that it's all these other people, accountants, lawyers, doctors, financial advisors, real entrepreneurs, meaning that they're not just like an expert entrepreneur, I don't mean like real, like you're not, but they're, They have a widget that's not their expertise somehow. Direct sales people and then even executives now are hiring us. A great example of this, it was a big bold move, is Glenn Sanford. And I don't think I've introduced you.

To him, but I've got connected to him. We've been texting. Okay, yeah, yeah.

So, Glenn Sanford is the billionaire founder of eXp realty, which is one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing real estate company in the world, right? So we met Glenn, we started working with Glenn as a client and then he bought Success Magazine.

That's crazy.

So Glenn didn't have much of a social media following but now he bought one. He bought a massive. Yeah, so he's got credibility and audience and reach because he and it's not just money. I mean, It's not money for him. I mean, like he's a billionaire, like money's not the thing, but impact is, reputation is, trust is, feeling like you're doing something good in the world, and they all work together. So on the professional services thing, 'cause we had a fascinating kind of like little data point on this, like you go, okay, I get personal branding if, you are an expert of some type. But what if you're a doctor? So 61% of Americans believe their doctor should have an established personal brand.

Why?

I guess trust.

Because I think if they have it, they'll trust them more.

Well, your doctor is a pretty intimate relationship, right? I mean, literally, like you see everything of a person and you go, Do I like this person? Do I trust them? Do I Do I believe in them? Going back to that thing I said earlier that 82% of Americans said that a company is more influential if their founder has a belief system that aligns with them. This is what we're looking for. Another way of saying this is people don't do business with companies. They do business with people. People that are real, people that we can trust, people that we can know intimate details about. And so it's not just their doctor, it is 58% of Americans believe their lawyer should have a personal brand. 55% think their banker should. Their coach, their financial advisors, their chiropractors.

Everyone.

I mean, we didn't ask about everyone. We asked about these. But what we can definitely say is that people want their professional service providers to have a personal brand. And we can also say that people are more likely to engage with a company if the executives have a personal brand. So in fact, we asked this question specifically. 67% of all Americans and if you just do Millennials, it's 76.5% are willing to spend more money with these companies if they're connected to the person. So again, all of these are just different data points that tell the same story. Personal branding is transcending this influencer space. It's transcending the thought leader space and it is becoming ubiquitous and pervasive in who gets promoted, who gets hired, who gets on the board, who gets equity, which company gets funded, even who we date and who we're friends with. It's fascinating, fascinating stuff. So, you asked a question about turning it into money.

Yes.

So, I said earlier that the fastest path to cash is services. Yes. We would modify that a little bit now to say the fastest path to cash is to monetize the thing you're already doing.

Like what?

Whatever it is you're doing. You're an accountant, you're a lawyer. So, I think there's been this thought of going, oh my gosh. So, I'm gonna use my personal brand to launch a side business. And actually it's going, no, I should use my personal brand to blow up my direct sales business and like, you know, pour fuel on the fire or to get myself promoted or to get myself more clients for my practice of whatever type of practice it is. It's not going, oh, I gotta go create an information product. It can be that. It historically has been that, but this is the migration that is happening here, which is interesting. And it was interesting to me to see, when Success Magazine did that cover article, and you were on there.

Brendan.

Brendan was on there. Several, several, Marie Forleo, and Trent Shelton, I think Rachel, Tim Ferriss, Rachel Cruz. Yeah, I mean it was really, really fascinating. They said the new thought leaders. And it's because people trust you guys. Right. Because they see you, they're entertained by you, they learn from you, they feel like they know you. It's not because you guys have the most PhDs. It's not because you're winning the Nobel Prizes for research. It's a much more human experience that's just available, widely available to all of us.

So how do we build the million dollar personal brand then? What's the steps? Is it just start creating content? Is it being strategic about certain moves you're gonna make? Is it partnerships? Is it press? Is it podcast? Like what are the steps to building it.

Yeah, well, the most important step is the first step, which is the step that everybody skips. And I shared this, you know, a while ago when we had this conversation, when we first started working together, that the best piece of personal branding advice I've ever received was from a guy named Larry Winget.

Yes.

And he said, the goal is to find your uniqueness so that you can exploit it in the service. of others. Find your uniqueness so you can exploit it in the service of others. So you need to find your uniqueness.

How do you find it?

Yeah, well we did that whole interview together where we walked you through our brand DNA Helix which is one of the brand builder group kind of frameworks so that you can reference that. You know, I'm not going to walk you through all of that here but I'll tell you we found a shortcut since then that's worth sharing.

Nice.

Okay. So, because this is a struggle, right? How do I find my uniqueness? It's almost like saying, how do I find my purpose? How do I find my passion? And this is, now that we've coached hundreds of people, you know, we've been at this for coming up on like three years now and this is all we do all day. We started to recognize a consistent theme in a shortcut and here's what it is. You are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.

Oh, yes, it's great.

You're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.

Yes, so I was 100 pounds overweight and I'm not there anymore.

Bingo.

I'm positioned to help anyone who's over 100 pounds overweight.

Do that thing.

I was in debt $100,000.

Dave Ramsey, right?

And I got out of it. And here's the process on how I got out of it.

He was bankrupt and he tells, and that's his whole story. And it can be you or someone close to you, so I also think about, you know, we have a mutual friend, Dr. Josh Axe, right? And I believe this was the diagnosis. I believe his mom had gotten diagnosed with cancer. And so he went on a mission to learn about food, to use food as medicine. He makes that basically his life pursuit to cure his mom. As a result of that, he starts answering questions for friends. He turns that, he starts sharing that on social. and now they have ancient nutrition, I think it's called ancient nutrition and it's like a massive business, a nine figure business, like monster business. But it came out of not a desire to make money but a desire to solve a problem. And that is the genesis of personal branding is going, what problem do I solve? What problem can I solve? What problem do I want to dedicate my life to solving.

Or at least a season of my life.

At least the next season of my life. Because that's what makes you come alive. And you know, for you, when we had this conversation, it was back in 2018. Self-doubt was the word that you were like, this is I want the great I want to help people overcome self-doubt and achieve greatness. So at that time, I just told you this earlier today. I was looking at my notes. You had 30 million total downloads.

It's crazy to think that 2018.

That was only 2018.

Gosh, you must have been more. It must have been a little more out of there.

I'm telling you.

30 million. And now we have 350 million.

350 million 10x'd in less like half the time it took to get there. And you've done a great job of being super clear on what problem you're after, what you're trying to solve, what you're trying to help people achieve, and your business model also, you've eliminated several things and you guys have gone all in and here we are in this beautiful studio. And I think that's the call for all of us is, you know, if I think the title of this is something like how to build a seven-figure personal brand.

You gotta first know what your personal brand is.

Yeah, what your uniqueness is. And what I would say is, If you focus on the money, you may compromise your reputation along the way.

Interesting. You may do things that aren't of the highest level of integrity or that you don't necessarily want to be doing or that might hurt people or whatever it may be.

You could burn them out. You could hurt people. It's just if you focus on the money, then you could compromise your reputation. But if you focus on the purpose, Or the mission. Of solving a problem. And you go, what problem can I solve? And think about all the great guests that you have. I mean, not so much the celebrity guests maybe, but like, you know, the doctors and the, you know, the psychologists. These people dedicate their life to studying this area of going, I want to help people with this. And that's where you start. So you have to find your uniqueness.

And what's that question? What is my uniqueness?

Well, yeah. So the Brand DNA Helix is six questions of the uniqueness lives at the intersection of those six questions. So just to rattle them off, what problem do you solve? And then what are you passionate about? So you brainstorm the answers to all these questions. and then at the intersection is where the uniqueness is. So what am I passionate about? Then what do I research? Which is what do I have academic or head knowledge of? And then what do I have results in? So that is what do I have experience doing? What have I done? That one kind of points to the your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. And then the last two questions address the business model, which is What are the things people would buy from me? Which are the pades, you know, there's five different basically things you could make. And then you compare that with what business do I want to be in? And that was where we talked about dares. Do you remember the dares?

Yes, I love the dares.

So, the dares is a checklist.

What business do I want to be in? That's the last question.

What business do I want to be in? So, the dares is a checklist of characteristics that sort of describe, I guess, You know, the closest thing to a perfect business model. I guess if there is such a thing.

-These are dares.

-You'Re looking for dares.

So, you're looking for things that are digital.

-Yes. -Automated, recurring, evergreen and scalable. So, when you go look for dares, you go, okay, it's digital. If it's digital, that means I don't have manufacturing costs. I don't have shipping. I don't have warehousing. I don't have logistics. I don't Like it's digital. If it's automated, it's self-service. It's like, I don't have a bunch, I don't need a bunch of staff to like service people. It's automated. It's recurring. They pay and they keep paying.

Netflix.

Yeah, Netflix. Yeah. And that recurring revenue also affects the overall valuation of a company. So that can have tremendous long-term financial impacts. Evergreen means it never needs to be updated. So you never have to do, you build the thing and then you never have to update it. And then the S scalable means that you can add a lot of customers without adding a lot of infrastructure. And so there's a difference between growth and scale. So growth is I can grow revenues, but I kind of have to like grow expenses.

Build a team and all this stuff.

Build a team to go with it. Scale means I can grow revenues and the fixed expenses the team don't have to grow proportionately.

-Small amount maybe of growth.

Yeah. -Yeah. It's not like a variable cost kind of a thing.

-So, you want to ask yourself these 6 questions and the last one being what business do I want to be in figuring out what's the business model.

-What'S the perfect business model?

-For me.

-Yeah. And there's many different business models. But it's, it's, there's not a best business model. There's only a best business model for you. Right. And so, when you're trying to figure out what is my best business model.

Like I don't want to build a software company.

Yeah.

Because I don't understand building programs and managing it and software. Like that's not something I understand and it doesn't excite me. It doesn't light me up. So, I'm not researching it all day. I'm not passionate about it. All these things. I haven't gotten people results in this software. Maybe in the future, I could do it if I had the right partner. But it's not... -You could be an investor. -Exactly. I can invest in it. But it's not the one thing I.

Want to drive every day with my time and energy. -Because you would... If you did it, it would be, oh, because building a software company has top-line valuations. I could get a huge multiple, have a big exit, make money and be happy. And you go, no, I'm miserable doing this thing. -Right. -Because it's not your unique It's not the design of your life. It's not the reason that you're here. Because we believe that the things that you've done in your past are hints and evidence and clues as to what your uniqueness is. But also the calling of your future is a hint and clue to what your uniqueness is. What you feel called towards gives us evidence of what your uniqueness is. And so it's like if you don't feel a compelling call there for any reason other than like money or something, that's not in the direction that we would advise you go because it's just not worth it. Right. And so when you're looking at what is the best business model, you take in factors like what you said, like what is my education? What are my passions? The question's right out of the Brand DNA Helix here.

What would I want to spend my time doing every day?

Yeah, like what would you do Saturday afternoon at 2:30? If you could do anything, that could be a thing. That's a place that you look. Now, that might not be the answer by itself. You have to factor in how would you make money and that's why it's like these six questions overlap. But that's what you're looking for. for because it's truth. There's not a right answer. There's just a right answer for you. It's not truth, it's just what's your truth. So, you pick a problem, you pick an audience, you pick a business model and then you said like how do you build a personal brand after that? So, from there usually what you do is you would extrapolate this into a body of work. If you were going to kind of build it, more like that expert business, that's how you would do it. But part of the realization, again, coming back to the study, is going so many people have already built the thing that they should use their personal brand to drive towards. They should just need to focus on leveraging and building their personal brand to drive towards that thing. It's a formula that we talk about called the reputation formula. Results times reach equals reputation. Results times reach equals reputation. Let's take financial advisor, okay? So financial advisors have all of this education. You know, they're a CFP and a CHLC and you know, they get all these Series 7. Series 7. All these licenses. They have all these results, all this knowledge. The problem is if I don't know about you, I cannot buy from you. I can't do business with you. So, reach matters and your personal brand is the fastest way to get that reach. And a lot of the top advisors in the world, at least in the country right now, are building their personal brand and they're driving leads that they're just passing to their team.

There's so many, when people think about personal branding and creating content online, there are so many different things that they could do to build their personal brand. Podcasting, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, white papers, infographics, photos, speeches, books, courses, there's all these things they could press, all these things they could do, what should they be thinking about first?

Yeah. So, the number one thing to think about is how can I add value to the audience? Right? That's what it ultimately comes down to. The strategy is much more important than the technology. How can I add value to the audience? How can I... And your social media strategy is one of the three E's. You're either going to educate, Encourage or entertain. And usually it's some mix of the three. I happen to not be super entertaining. I live more in the educating and with bursts of encouragement that kind of come in there. But you're going, how can I teach what I know? And here's the other thing. We all take for granted what we know. We have something called the curse of knowledge. If I'm a financial advisor, I assume, well obviously everybody knows what a 401k is. Nobody knows what a 401k is. Like, nobody understands any of that stuff. Like, nobody understands your industry terms. This is for every industry. Like, people go, oh, well, you know, of course everyone knows about gun health. People don't even know what the gut is. Like, they don't have time to do anything other than the stuff they do in their life. So you have value and what you do is you basically, you know, I love Jay Baer, who's a friend of mine, and you know, basically his whole content marketing strategy is just be useful. Teach everything you know for free, but teach it one bite at a time and in all random order. Because, and so sometimes people get nervous, Louis, they go, well, how is this going to help me build a seven figure brand? if I'm giving away everything for free? Well, you have to realize people don't pay for information, they pay for organization and application.

-Mm-. What does that mean?

-It means that I could teach you how to eat healthy. It doesn't mean you're going to go to the grocery store, buy the right groceries, cook up the right food and then eat and you know, weigh yourself every week and da-da-da-da. You need the application. You need someone to help create a custom meal plan, hold you accountable, track you to the thing. We all know to lose weight we should exercise more, but we don't actually do it. We need someone to help us apply it. Brandon's group is a great example, right? Here we are, we're teaching you all this, we're teaching you all these concepts. There's a lot of people out there listening right now that are still gonna go, Okay, I need someone to help me walk through and apply the brand DNA Helix to my situation. I need someone to help me apply this data to my business. I need it like it's the application part that is the hard part.

-Right.

-And I think actually this is again a trend that's changing in personal branding. Personal branding started early on very much in that kind of info marketing kind of a space.

-Nice.

- And I would even say there's some negative connotation or a little bit of scamminess that has, you know, probably caused some people to be reluctant to kind of like get into personal branding or online marketing. But it's changing because information is commoditized. You give away the information for free, but people need you to help them apply it.

It's the packaging of it and the application. Or would you say the application and the what?

The organization.

The packaging of the organization. Yeah, yeah.

And the application, and the application of it. So that's what they need. Right. And that is the best way to garner attention, is to be useful, is to share what you know, to teach what you have. The goal is not, I will share a little bit, and then you gotta pay me for the goods. That's a scarcity mindset based on information.

Share the goods. and pay me for the packaging.

Yeah, yeah.

The application, the packaging, the holding your hand, the walking you through it, the accountability, all that stuff.

Right.

Yeah.

And if you're, again, just, I'm using the financial advisor just because I'm using it here, right? It's like you're teaching people. And if you're doing a good job, like you're teaching people, oh, yeah, here's, here's how to evaluate mutual funds and here's things you can do. And, like, there's going to be a few people that would do it on their own, but most people, the more they learn, the more they're gonna go, like, This is crazy. I need an expert. Can you just do this for me? That's what you want, right? When somebody sees, oh, there's a whole strategy to launching books and to getting keynotes and to building this stuff out and they go, yeah, I think I'll give Brad Middleditch's group a call. Some of them will go do it their self. That's fine. The worst case scenario there is you're helping people and you're impacting the world. but more people than not will go, I like you, I trust you, I've learned from you, I see the value in what you're offering. I would like to hire you. And that is true whether it is hiring you as a professional service provider, an expert or hiring you for the company.

Right?

Like if I'm going to hire you to the company, guess what? I'm going to look at your LinkedIn profile.

Absolutely.

I'm going to look at your Facebook page. page. I want to read and the most important part on your LinkedIn profile is I want to read the endorsements of all your past employers and what they said about you. That's what I want to see, testimonials. And you said it's the first thing we want to think about is the.

Strategy, not the platform. Is that what you said? Think about the... Strategy is more important than technology. Because a lot of people say, well, should I launch a YouTube channel? Should I do a podcast? Should I be on Instagram? Should I do Facebook Live every morning, they think about the platform, the technology of where they should be or what they should be creating. And that's probably not the best question to ask first, is it?

No, yeah.

Strategy. How can I be most useful?

How can I be most useful? Where are my people at?

Where's my audience? And not, oh, Sally Jo is doing YouTube videos every day, so I should do YouTube videos because it looks cool and this is happening over there.

Don't do that. Don't do it because Lewis does it. -Right.

Don't do it because... -Right. Is my audience on YouTube? Is my audience consuming this content? Or do I enjoy... Am I passionate about being on video? Do I enjoy this process?

Is this something I'd have fun doing like you said in these questions? Then maybe YouTube's a place to go. -Yeah. Now, what's cool, this is something I don't think we've ever talked about here is the content diamond. So, the content diamond, what's really cool about media, media is a multiplier. Right? And so, you know, you mentioned procrastination on purpose in my TED Talk, How to Multiply Time, right? You multiply time by spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow. Well, what we're also just kind of realizing is going, oh, media is one of the great forms of multiple, is a multiplier, because if I create a video today, then every day that video is out there, that video is like an employee. It's working for me to find new people.

It's getting audience, getting attention, getting leads, getting traffic, getting trust, reputation.

Reputation.

For you without you doing any more extra work.

Right.

I was mentioning to you this beforehand that I think it's three or four of our top viewed videos in the last 30 days are from videos that are one, two, three years ago.

Amazing.

That keep getting views that we spent an hour or two hours doing years ago and they're getting hundreds of thousands of views right now this month working for us. That investment in media is paying dividends years later and will continue to. It becomes a flywheel, whatever platform you're building on. The more consistent you are with time, usually it pays off dividends the longer you're on there.

You're such a rolling stone, buddy. You know how much I believe in you. You've done all these things and now you've got multiple media assets that are all synergistically feeding each other and it's like it's a snowball that gets bigger and bigger and faster and faster. It's incredible. So coming back to the content diamond. So the way the content diamond works is pretty simple. We encourage our clients, like here's the whole technical strategy. Shoot one five minute video every week. That's it. On your five minute video, answer one question. Teach one tip. That's it. It could be less than five minutes, but five minutes. And then here's what's amazing about video. You're going to take that video and you're going to split it. This is how the Content Diamond works. We're going to split it on two paths. One path is what we call the text and imagery path. The other path is video and audio. Okay, so someone from your team, you know, if you don't have a team, it's you. But if you have a team, they're going to take that video and they're going to upload it to a tool like Temi, T-E-M-I, or rev.com or speechpad. There's a bunch of these, which is an automatic transcription service. And they're going to transcribe that article. From that transcription, someone's going to edit that article into a full-length post for like that you can put on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium. But it's in your voice, because it was literally your voice. Then they're gonna select like two or three catchphrases from the article that they're gonna turn into image quotes for Instagram and Pinterest.

And Facebook or whatever.

And Facebook and whatever. Simultaneously, while that's happening on the text and imagery path, someone's gonna take the raw video, and they're going to add a little polish to it. Lower thirds, a little bit maybe of some B-roll, some stock imagery, some stock music. Maybe they drop a fancy bumper like an opener and an outro. And now all of a sudden, you've got this like semi-polished nice YouTube video that you post in full on YouTube. But then you could post a 60-second version of that. on TikTok, a two-minute version of that on IGTV. And you disassemble this one five-minute video into all of these mini assets. So the five-minute video is like your main asset and then you disassemble it into mini assets and then the diamond comes together. So you start here, the diamond comes together at the bottom, post all of it on your blog. your website. So the one place where people can get all of it. Oh, by the way, your video, you can strip the audio off the video.

Yeah, I can do that.

And now you have a short form podcast. Right. So now you're a podcaster, you didn't even know it. Yeah. But the one place to go to see the full length video, the full length article, an audio player, the pull out, you know, the two or three pull out quotes is on your blog, which is traffic you own. where you optimize it for Google and SEO and you build subscriber base and in addition to supporting the social media sites and building an audience there, you also are curating an experience on your website which matters tremendously long term for search results and things like that.

So, a lot of people think I've got to work on all these platforms and create content for all these things but really what you should be thinking about is How do we create a great piece of content for five minutes or roughly around there? Yeah. Once a week and really think about that piece of content. Yes. Whether it's scripting or bullet points or whatever to make sure you have everything in that one piece that will then be distributed to all these other places as opposed to thinking, I got to be an expert on all these other places and build content for them. Just build one piece of great content. That's what we do here. We do three times a week. and we do it in video, audio, text, image, graphics, all that stuff, and we built the team to do that. There are services out there that can do this for you, too. Do you guys do this at Brand Builders?

So at Brand Builders, we do exclusively personal brand strategy, right? Yes. So we kind of, we're, what a CMO is to a company is what we are to a personal brand. So we only work with people. We don't work with companies. Now we work with executives and service providers, that work at a company but we work on that person's face. It's personal brand strategy. But we have a whole trusted vendor partner network and we've got a bunch of them. You need a video editor, you need a book editor, you need a... We connect the clients to all those people.

What's the biggest problem that people have when they come and work with you?

It is dilution. It is diluted focus. It is.

Where they have too many opportunities, they're not sure where to put their time. They want to do a book and a course and a TED Talk and a social media content and a podcast and they want to do all of it and they're not sure where to start.

Yeah, and when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. Right. That's right. Good old take a stairs book, which has been out for years now. But yeah, people struggle to get clear on What is their uniqueness? Who do they serve? What is their business model? And what is their methodology? So Brand Builders Group has a curriculum. We actually have one curriculum that's divided into 12 courses. But in our phase one, which is like our first three courses, really help people just get clear on what problem do I solve? Who do I solve it for? How do I solve it? How do I make money? They got to select and be clear on that uniqueness first before you try to add scale. What people do is they go out and they try to build audience right away. They do it completely backwards because what you have is you have a way to make money and then you have your online presence like your website and then you have traffic sources. The proper way to build it is get clear on how you're going to make money and what the product offer is. Then build your reputation, your website, a professional presentation, then worry about traffic. People do the opposite. They go straight to social media and go, How do I get a lot of followers? And then I got to try them, oh shoot, I need to build a... I need to shoot, I need to build a website. And it's like, oh, okay, how do I turn those people into money? And so their strategy is come... Backwards. Completely backwards. And then they go, this doesn't work. Why should I do it? And you know, for a while it was like, well, you don't have to because this is a, you know, personal branding is a thing. But now the data is saying, no, this is the future. It is more profitable and it's an accelerator of trust. And if you miss this, right? Like, this is your last chance. I mean, like Gary Vee's been out there talking about this for a minute.

For 10 years.

-Right? -Yeah, yeah. Some of us have been watching and been like, okay, that's kind of cool. And gosh, I see what it's meant for him, but, you know, I don't have his style and I don't cuss like that. I'm not a big personality. I don't want to write a book. Yeah, I'm not a person. I don't want to be a speaker. But it's like, if you've been thinking that, you missed it. He'd been talking about it and now I'm here telling you the data is here saying the time is now. Like, millennials, older millennials, Younger Millennials and Gen Z, this is what they look at to build trust.

And buy from.

Which means that's who they buy from, that's who they hire, that's who they refer, that's who they date. That's who they recommend, that's who they share.

And here's what you say, if someone is not on social media, even with a small little personal brand, you might wonder like, I don't know who this person is at all. find them online. Now it's like if they don't have LinkedIn, if they don't have Instagram or Facebook and you can't see anything, what are they hiding? Is there something, can I really trust this person? Again, like you said, if you can't see them, it's hard to trust them.

The person you see more, you learn to trust more. Yeah, you just, yeah, that we don't, we trust the familiar and we distrust the unfamiliar.

The unknown.

The unknown. Whether whether it's online or it's walking down the street. If somebody, it's nighttime and someone's walking at me, I don't recognize them. I distrust them. Not because I'm racist or a scaredy cat or a coward or anything. It's just unfamiliar. I don't know who you are. I distrust that. And this is part of the big point, right? Is that you cannot think of personal branding as online marketing. It's not. Personal branding is the digitization of reputation.

-Yes.

-It is building trust, making impact, growing your influence. And it is the future and it is profitable and you can use it to monetize the thing you're already doing.

-Yes.

-And that is how you build a 7-figure personal brand.

-We covered a lot today. We covered the data around personal branding. We've covered the elements that are important to personal branding, how to build the million dollar personal brand. We talked about reputation, testimonials, pades, the different revenue streams. We also talked about the questions you need to ask yourself in order to figure out what your uniqueness is. We talked about dares. We've talked about all these different things. the formulas, the content, diamonds, so many things. And for people that are wanting more, I want you to know that Rory is a partner of mine and I only have a couple people that I do partnerships with on stuff that I don't think I can do as well. And you have Brand Builders Group. I think we've sent over a thousand leads to you plus and hundreds of people who have gone through your trainings. your strategies and help execute on what their uniqueness is, how to figure out their revenue streams, how to help them build their TED Talks, their book proposals, all these different processes for building personal brand. And we created a little video for you guys. If you want to learn more, you can go to lewishouse.com/brandcall to get a free call from someone on your team just to ask them about their goals. Ask them about their goals, what their future looks like, what they're trying to create, and if it might be helpful for you or your team to support them in building their personal brand and executing these things. So if you guys are interested, go to lewishouse.com/brandcall. You can schedule a time with someone on Roy's team to learn more. I know that so many people that are influencer friends of mine have been through the process. and the process you guys created and rave about the results they get. So many people you've had have been New York Times bestselling authors.

Yeah.

From this process, people have built multiple million dollar brands.

Viral TED Talks.

Viral TED Talks, big book launches, course launches, all these things.

Social media follower growth.

Yeah, so you work with the best of the best in this space. And there's only one person I recommend and it's Rory, so make sure you guys check it out. LewisHowes.com/brand call. We're going to be doing a series around personal branding, productivity, confidence and mindset, because I think a lot of it, when people have the strategy and the tactic, even if you have the best strategies and tactics, you still need to believe in yourself. You still need the skill set in order to have the confidence to put yourself out there, because when you put yourself out there, you're going to get negative comments, feedback, hate. people trying to tear you down and that holds a lot of people back. So we're going to teach you through this series with Rory that will be dropping over a few months more of these things and more on how to monetize with your personal brand using these other skills and mindset strategies. So make sure you follow Rory. What's your best place to follow you online? Is it Instagram right now?

On social, yeah. But if you go to RoryBadeN.com, blog.com. but I would just say go to go to lewishouse.com/brandcall. Request the call. You do that, you'll get connected to me. And there you go. But yeah, you know, I'm out there on social.

He's out there, Rory Vaden everywhere. You can check out one of his books, Take the Stairs or Procrastinate on Purpose. If you want to learn how to multiply time, make sure to check these out as well. Rory Vaden, we're going to be doing a series. So we'll see you back here soon. And thanks so much for being here and teaching us these strategies, man. Appreciate you.

Always a pleasure, brother. And just remember, the calling that you feel on your heart to go out and do this is the result of a signal that's being sent out by someone else who needs you right now more than you need them.

Amen. Thank you. Appreciate you.

Love you, brother.

Love you too, man. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Rory Vaden and I had him on a while back to talk more in depth about building an influential personal brand and I think you'll really love this interview with him as well. A few months back, I called you because I felt like I was at a crossroads in my brand, in my business. And for whatever reason, I said, I think Rory can help me. And you've done so much work over the last 15 years in multiple different areas of business from, you know, live events, door-to-door sales, to building a bigger brand, to helping influencers, to writing New York Times bestselling books. You've done it all. You've done a lot of different things in terms of building a personal brand, building a company, and you've helped a lot of people do that. And I just said for some reason I think you can help me kind of take my vision to a new level and gain clarity for my personal brand, my level of reach and influence that I want to take to the next level. And I felt like I had done a pretty good job up to this point, but just felt like I needed someone to help give clarity with everything happening in my head. So, I called you up. I went to Nashville, I think a week or two later, brought Cesar, Matt, and we spent two days diving into which was one of the most powerful experiences of my professional life, I would say. Wow. Was diving in and gaining clarity on who I am, the brand I'm building, where I'm headed, and the business that I'm in. And we learned some incredible things. And so I wanted to dive into what we learned and really how anyone, if you have a brand right now, a personal brand that you're looking to build and you're looking to leverage your reach to generating more revenue and more impact, to helping everyone listening who wants to build a personal brand, how to make a clear decisions so that it's much easier in the process. So, that's what I wanted to do today is to kind of go over some of the things that we went over in two days in an hour and help people just have incredible results with their personal brands.

-Well, I love it. And you, I mean, you were doing more than an okay job. You were doing an amazing job.

-Thank you.

-And I have to say, man, it's such an honor to get that phone call from you because I, I mean, I know you could have called anybody. Right. And, you know, when you called me and AJ, it was late at night, and it was like, I mean, I hadn't talked to you in a year. It's been that long? It had been a minute. It's been a minute. Some emails. But it was like, and it was late at night.

I was like, what's going on?

What's up? Yeah. Like, and then, and then you're like, hey, I, I think, I think you guys, I think you were the one that can help me with this. Yeah. So, yeah, let's Whatever you want to talk about, man. Let's do it.

It was very powerful and it's been a lot to reflect on. What was it like six weeks ago, maybe almost two months ago?

Yeah, I mean it's been a while.

It's been a lot to reflect on. We're still implementing a lot of things that you share with us. But I wanted to break down a rough overview of some of the things that we went over in two days and then kind of share with people what they can do at home to really get clear on how they're going to build their own celebrity influential personal brand. And some of the things that we talked about which you've designed and developed which I think is really cool is and correct me if these names are wrong, figuring out your brand DNA. So, and an overview of that is finding your uniqueness and exploiting it in the service of others which is not your quote. Quote from Larry Winget.

Yeah, Larry Winget.

So first off, discovering what your brand DNA is essentially who you are, who you're serving and how you're going to to serve them. And then going into the brand Helix, which for me was huge. We'll talk about the brand Helix in a minute.

-Yeah.

-Then figuring out what business you are actually in. And you do that by structuring by... We did a session with you and a lot of these were discussions where you just asked us questions. -Yeah. -So, what are all the revenue streams?

-Revenue streams.

-I think we had like 7 or 8 main revenue streams that we counted. And We thought we were in one business but based on revenue streams, you were like, well actually you're in this business.

And you're moving to... -Which we were both surprised by.

-Exactly.

-Neither one of us. So, we'll talk about how to know what business you're really in.

-What business you're really in which is going to be helpful for the future of your brand. Creating your yes and no list which has been a game changer for me because I said yes to so many things because I felt like, well there's great money here. there's great money here, there's great opportunity here, but it hurts the brand in certain things and it hurts your time. You can't multiply time when you say yes to these things. We'll talk about that. Dares, which you haven't talked about publicly.

Yet, which I'm excited to share. Yes, never shared that publicly.

This is the concept of Dares. Dares is something we still have on our wall that we wrote down because.

It'S the thing we think about...

I saw it in Matt's office when I walked in. It's the thing that we think about.

When creating anything now.

Does it have Dares.

These components.

All, was that five components?

Yeah.

Five components when launching any product service, it must have the dares. So make sure you listen to that. Your brand mantra, talking about your reputation, how to build reputation. We talked about a lot of other things, but I think these are some of the things we'll cover today.

Well, and starting with reputation and just what is personal branding, I think is huge. Because so brand builders group, we don't brand companies. We brand people. And we believe that the future of branding is not about companies. It's about individual people and it's all based on your personal reputation. And if you think about it, you know, like you give me a phone call. I don't just take a phone call from anybody at 9:45 on a whatever night it was. And But it's like when I see Lewis Howes mobile, it's like, Hey, something, you know, Lewis must need something, right? Pick it up. And that is based on your reputation. And so when we think about personal branding, I think a lot of times our mind goes to, oh, my logo, my website, those things are important. But the essence of a personal brand starts with a person's reputation. And you can design a logo in a week. But it takes years to build what we call a rock-solid reputation.

-How long does it take to ruin a reputation?

-I mean, a reputation can be ruined in minutes.

-Crazy, right?

-One, it can be ruined in minutes. It can one bad decision. And there's many examples of this, right? And I think one reason I feel drawn to you, like just I feel like God draws me to you is because I believe you're going to become one of the biggest celebrities of our time. And I know that you're going to have a lot coming at you and a lot of people coming to you with lots of opportunities and no shortage of temptation in any variety of fashions. And I know your heart about what your reputation is and how you've built it. And I want to be somebody that is like a bumper lane for you to help do that. And so, you know, when you think of reputation too, as it relates to our business, one of the things that AJ and I realized, so AJ is my wife and my business partner. She's co-founder of Brand Builders Group. And is we realized that for a company, especially a small company, but even for big companies, a lack of revenue is what we all think about. is what we all talk about. Like, oh, we need more revenue, we need more money. But a lack of revenue is not your greatest problem. Lack of reputation is your greatest problem.

Why is that?

Because reputation precedes revenue, right? Reputation is about trust, it's about faith, it's about conviction, it's about belief. And so we created something called reputation formula, which I haven't shared this with you, so I'm interested to get your thoughts. But basically the reputation formula works like this. Results times reach equals reputation. Results times reach equals reputation. So your results are the results you've delivered in your life. The results you've accumulated or accomplished for yourself. but also the results you've accomplished for your clients. It's the things that you have done or that you've helped people do. Now results can be positive or negative.

Yeah, if you have no results and no following, then your reputation is bad.

Is bad, yeah. But you can also have a negative reputation. So the reputation formula isn't about positive or negative because the results part can be positive or negative. Now the reach part can't be negative, but it can be zero. So, even if you have the greatest results, if you have the world's best widget or the best company or you're the smartest person ever, those are great results. But if your reach is zero, then your reputation is still zero. Because if people don't know about you, they can't do business with you. New is not your greatest problem. Lack of reputation is your greatest problem.

Why is that?

Because reputation precedes revenue. Reputation is about trust, it's about faith, it's about conviction, it's about belief. So if you have great results and a lot of reach, that's Mother Teresa. She's well respected for delivering this service to people. Now, if you have horrible results and a lot of reach, you're Osama bin Laden, right? You did something horrible and a lot of people knew about it and that's a very bad belief. And so we created something called the reputation formula, which I haven't shared this with you so I'm interested to get your thoughts. But bad reputation. So it can be positive or negative but at the end of the day, the size of the reputation is a result of the size of the result times, basically the reputation formula works like this. Results times the reach. And so that informs reach equals reputation. Your personal brand which reputation precedes revenue. So that informs your ability, dictates your ability really, that what your personal brand is going to be worth.

So should people be focusing on revenue.

Or reputation People should results times reach equals reputation. So, your results are the results you've delivered in your life. The results you've accumulated or accomplished for yourself but also the results you've accomplished for your clients. It's the things that you have done or that you've helped people do. Absolutely 100% be focused on reputation first.

Reputation. And reputation means building, doing something good, adding value and and building an audience.

Yeah, well, building the audience, I think, is separate. Okay, so if you're just doing something good is the results, and it's years. It's years, and you have to do it right, too. Now, results can be positive or negative.

Yeah, if you have no results and no fun.

Here's the thing. Building a business, my personal opinion, building a business is not nearly as valuable.

Following than your reputation Is bad.

Yeah. But you can also have a negative, is building a reputation. You can build a business, you can jump reputation. So, the reputation formula isn't about positive or negative because the results part can be positive or negative. Now, the reach part can't be negative. Lots of revenues. There's lots of business models you can get in. You can do...

Build an Amazon business.

Yeah. Whatever.

And hair salon, you can do anything.

And there's ways you can make money, right? I could probably go open a check into cash, like a payroll, like a payday loan thing and make a lot of money. I'm personally not going to do that. It's not bad that if you are, if that's your thing, fine, but for me, but it can be zero. So even if you have the greatest results, if you, for all of us, and I think this is the point, is you got to define in your life, you have the world's best widget or the best company or you're the smartest person. what you're gonna say yes to and what you're gonna say no to. Those are great results, but if your reach is zero, then your reputation is still zero. Because if people don't know about you, they can't do business with you. What is inbounds and what is out of bounds? What are the things that you consider acceptable that you want your reputation associated with and what are the things that you don't? And that is really, really important. important. And so you have to make that decision that your reputation matters more. Your reputation matters more than money, more than revenue. It matters more than refunding that customer, right? Like if the customer... So if you have great results and a lot of reach, you know, that's Mother Teresa, right? She's well as upset. Refund them the money if it's cost... your reputation is so much more valuable than one respected for delivering this service to people. Now, if you have a customer and I think again, one of the reasons I'm drawn to you and why you call and I answer and you say, Hey, I need help and I'm there, is because you've done that, Louis, and horrible results and a lot of reach. You're Osama bin Laden, right? You did something and I think When people listen to this show, they never get the sense, oh, Lewis is after my money. They never get that sense. Horrible and a lot of people knew about it and that's very bad. They only get a sense of Lewis is trying to help people. He's doing good in the world. He's trying to learn.

And that builds your reach and builds results which increases reputation.

Which eventually leads to revenue, right? Here we are at reputation. So it can be positive or negative, but at the end of the day, the size of the reputation is a result of the size of the result times the reach. And so that informs in your place in the Hollywood Hills and you're doing all right for yourself and that's great. And that's what I think a lot of people don't understand too, is if you focus on reputation, Revenue shows up as a byproduct. But if you focused on just your personal brand, which reputation precedes revenue, so that informs your ability, dictates your ability really, that what your personal brand is supposed to be worth.

So should people be focusing on revenue or reputation first?

People should absolutely profit. Then sometimes, you know, people kind of get hurt along the way.

Because they're focusing all their decisions on making money.

Just money. Yeah. And it's like, and it doesn't matter. And that's one of the things I love about the.

I make a lot of decisions that lose me a lot of money, but build reputation.

Yes. Absolutely. 100% be focused on reputation first.

Reputation. And reputation means building, doing an event in Columbus, Ohio.

Yeah.

The first two years, we lost money. But I wanted to add value, give back, do something meaningful for me as well as my audience. And I think long term it'll pay off into bigger revenue than let me do an event in... Doing something good, adding value and building an audience.

Yeah, well, building the audience I think is separate. Okay, so if you just doing something good is the results and it's years. It's years and you have to do it right.

Los Angeles or New York, I'm going to get the most people to show up and make more money right away. I think that's the key. When I launched the podcast, I said for the first year, we're not going to do any sponsorships. We're not going to try to make money. We're just going to add value and continue to give good content.

And you say no? Here's the thing. Building a business, my personal opinion, building a business is not nearly as valuable is building a reputation. You can build a business, you can join to certain sponsors. -Absolutely. -Like no loss. -You say no to all sorts of all sorts of sponsors. Because you define look like these are things I don't believe in. -Sure.

-Even if they're paying, it's like... And I think that's really huge. -So, the business could be making more money but we choose not to because.

It doesn't align to our brand DNA.

-Right. -And I think that's something... -Lots of revenues. There's lots of business models you can get in. You can do... -Build an Amazon business that everyone should clear on is what is your uniqueness? And you continue to talk about that with a lot of people that you work with in the brand builders group is figuring out who are you essentially? What is your uniqueness?

Yeah.

How can you then exploit that to people? Because your uniqueness is probably more important than anything else.

-Right.

-Figuring out this, you can do whatever.

And... -And there's ways you can make money, right? Like I could probably go open a check and into cash, like a payroll.

How unique you are is your identity and that's what's going to attract the right customers.

-Like a payday loan thing and make a lot of money.

-I'M personally... -Customers and the right opportunities.

-Absolutely. And I want to make sure and give a shout out to Larry Winget so he knows. He said this and the moment I heard it, I was like, that's one of the most brilliant things I've ever heard. -Actually, not going to do that. It's not bad that if you are, if that's your thing, fine. for me. And, you know, he said, the key is find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. And I was like, that's wrong, man. And there's people that do that. You are somebody who does that. And I think you have to... The challenge is getting clear on what makes you unique, what makes you special for all of us. And I think this is the point is you got to define in your life what you're gonna say yes to and what you're gonna say no to. What is inbounds and what is out of bounds? What are the things that you consider acceptable that you want your reputation associated with and what are the things that you don't? Special, what makes you different? And here's another mutual friend of ours, you know, Sally Hogshead and she wrote Fascinate and...

Difference better than better.

Different is better than better.

I've I've remembered that since the moment she said it on a stage like eight years ago.

I was just with, I just shared the stage with her like a few days ago. I mean, she... And I say that all the time. Different is better than better. And the other thing is, you know, what I love about, you know, she teaches... And that is really, really important. And she teaches people how to be fascinating. And what I love about what she says is it's not that you learn how to become fascinating, it's that you learn how to become more of yourself. So, you have to make that decision that your reputation matters. And that is like, that's it, man. Like when it matters more. Your reputation matters more than money, more than revenue. It matters more than refunding that customer, right? Like if the customer you are doing you, then you're uncopyable.

That's it. It's funny, I heard, I was watching an interview of the Rock yesterday with Jamie Foxx. And he said when he got into the movie business, his management team was like, you need to lose weight, you need to start acting a different way, you need to start...

Really?...

Softer, like all these things. And he lost all this weight, got skinny, like looked really weird. And then he's upset.

Refund them the money. He fired them.

He said, you know what? If I'm going to do this business, I'm going to do it my way, which is like becoming more of me. like amplifying the-- if it's cost-- like.

Your reputation is so much more valuable than one customer. And I think, again, one of the reasons I'm drawn to you and why you call and I answer and you say, Hey, I need help and I'm there, is because you've done that, Louis.

Rockness. Like they told him not to use the rock. They'd use Dwayne Johnson as his name. He's like, you know what? I'm going back to who I am, making about the people. like getting bigger and stronger, like whatever it is is his thing.

Look how that's worked out.

And today he just posted that he was the highest paid actor of all time in one year. I think that was right. It was at the highest paid actor, like 112 million.

And I think when people listen to this show, they never get the sense.

In one year of all time, the.

Greatest actors Oh, Lewis is after my money. Yeah. They never get that sense.

He is the highest paid.

And otherwise he would have been like everybody else and he would have, you know.

Yeah, maybe he would have done okay.

Yeah.

But he wouldn't have...

They only get a sense of Lewis is trying to help people. He's doing good in the world. He's trying to learn.

And that builds your reach and builds results. Been different.

It's celebrating what makes you especially you. And that's what people are drawn to. Like, you know, people know. I was... And, you know, like I know when I see you, you're always in a t-shirt and you always... We were the same cologne. That's like one thing I always know, it's good.

Which increases reputation.

Which eventually leads to revenue, right? Like, here we are. You are you and when people see me, it's like I'm in a pocket square and you're placed in the Hollywood Hills and you're doing alright for yourself and that's great. And that's what I think a lot of people don't understand too is if you focus on reputation, revenue shows up and I have a flower. It's because I was raised by a single mom who sold Mary Kay and like, you know, I get manicures and pedicures. I do.

It's your style.

It's who I am. It's just who I am. And I think that's what's amazing is... And here's the challenge too. So, there is a part of this that is invigorating to your spirit. There's also a part of this that is dominating as a business strategy. Because the challenge up is a byproduct. But if you focus on just profit, then sometimes people kind of get hurt along the way.

-Because they're focusing all their decisions on making money.

-Just money.

-Yeah.

-And it's like... And it doesn't matter. And that's one of the things I.

Love about the... -You make a lot.

Of decisions today is noise.

-So much noise. -So much content. Everyone's posting everyday content.

-That'S it. So how do you... How do you break through the noise? Because there's always somebody that's gonna be smarter than you. There's always someone who's funnier than you.

Better looking.

Better looking, better connected, has more money to do whatever.

That lose me a lot of money but build reputation.

Yes. And I think the thing that you see is when a celebrity grows, it's.

Because they're doing an event in Columbus, Ohio.

Yeah.

The first two years, lost money. But I wanted to add value, give back, do something meaningful for me as well as my audience. And I think long...

Being raw and authentic and it's themself. And that is what people are drawn to because we live in this world of...

Term it'll pay off into bigger revenue than let me do an event in Los Angeles or New York. I'm going to get the most people to show up and make more money money right away. I think that's the key. When I launched the podcast, I said for the first year, we're not going to do any sponsorships. We're not going to try to make money.

Tremendous fakeness, right? I mean, we have these masks and we wear masks and we do it because we're completely insecure. Trying to fit in. We're trying to fit in. We're totally insecure and like... -And a.

Personal brand should be about standing out. -Yes. -Not fitting in missionary about how do you stand? We're just going to add value and continue to give good content.

-And you say no?

-And out more. -Yes. -And you talk about this in the brand Helix.

Can you break it down? -Put a certain sponsors. -Absolutely. -You say no to all sorts of sponsors. -Because you've defined. -If you want to draw for yourself. -Yeah. -Yeah. So, I'll kind of like try to draw it out. -So, explain it. -If you think about brand DNA, right? So, we kind of thought of like, you know, a chromosome sort of a looking thing. So, this these are things I don't believe in.

-Sure.

-Even if they're paying, it's like... And I think that's really huge. This isn't the world's perfect drawing. But if you think about kind of like a chromosome, huge.

-So, the business could be making more money but we choose not to because it doesn't.

-These aren't the only questions. These are just questions really that mentors, my mentors asked me that helped me kind of get clear and I always think about. And I think these are questions anybody listening that says, okay, I have a personal brand, I want to grow it.

Or I want to build a personal... -Align to our brand DNA. -Right. -And I think that's something that everyone should get clear on is what is your uniqueness? And you continue to talk about that with a lot of people that you.

Work with and the brand builders group is figuring out who's a brand or you're an executive of a company or something and it's like, okay, I want to use my brand to grow my business. is you ask yourself these questions. And so the first question where all personal branding starts is just getting clear on this. And this is from my man David Avrin.

Who are you essentially? What is your uniqueness? How can you then exploit that to people?

David Avrin mentored me from the time I was super young and he said, Rory, you have to get crystal clear on what problem do you solve? What problem do you solve? The way that Dave said it is he said, To what question are you the answer? And until you get... Because your uniqueness.

Is probably more important than anything else. Figuring out how unique you are is your identity and that's what's going to attract the right customers and the right opportunities.

Absolutely. And I want to make sure and give a shout out to Larry Winget. Get clear on the problem you solve. So he knows, like he said this and the moment I heard it, I was like, that's one of the most brilliant things I've ever heard. You get absorbed by the noise because you're out there talking about, you know, we do this and we do that and we do this. But the moment you start promoting the problem, promoting the questioned. He said, the key is find your uniqueness and exploit it. That is when people start to pay attention because now it's like, whoa, this person can help me solve a problem. So you have to get really clear on what in the service of others. And I was like, what problem do you solve? Then the next question is what are you passionate about?

That's strong, man.

And there's people that do that. You are somebody who does that and I think you have to, the challenge is getting and there's two parts of this sort of brand helix. So the top part here, this is all sort of external facing. So this is like how you appear or occur in the world. And then this bottom part, this part is internal. So this is more like your internal monologue, like your psychographic. Clear on what makes you unique, what makes you special, what makes you different. And here's another mutual friend of ours, you know, Sally Hogshead, and she wrote.

Fascinate and Difference Better Than Better.

And these correspond with each other. So the problem I solve, because there may be many problems you solve, right? Like you can teach people how to do All sorts of different stuff.

But what's the thing you're passionate about as well? And when they intersect, that's when it's a sweet spot.

Bingo. Right, yeah. So that's what different is better than better.

I've remembered that since the moment she said it.

We're looking for is the intersection of the external sort of who you were designed, who the world needs you to be, and who you were designed to love. Who you love being. So, what problem do I solve? The next thing is...

Stage like eight years ago.

I just shared the stage with her like a few days ago.

I mean, she's... And I say that all the time.

Different is better than better. And the other thing is, you know, what I love about, you know, she teaches people how to be fascinating and what I love about what she says is it's not this sort of, what am I perceived as an expert on? And expertise is interesting. because expertise is really more about perception.

What do people think I'm an expert at?

Yes. Like you introduced me, I think you said, you learn how to become fascinating is that you learn how to become more of yourself. You know, Rory's a New York Times bestselling author, right? So why do you choose to say that? Because people hear that and they go, ah, expert, credible, right? That's, and that, ah, and that is like, That's it, man. And that's something that you get and there's a certain type of person that takes a lot of work to get that. And so, there's these triggers that we kind of think through. We walk people. You are doing you. Then you're uncopyable.

That's it. It's funny, I heard I was watching an interview of the Rock yesterday.

Through this actually, what are the triggers of what make you perceived as an expert? And one of the exercises we take people through, I actually don't think we did this with you, but we write your bio and then we do what's called your future bio.

Interesting, I like that. With Jamie Foxx and he said when he got into the movie business, his management team was like, you need to lose weight, you need to start acting in different ways.

We asked the question five years from now, What does your bio need to be? And that's actually how we met.

That's cool.

Because you and I met before the launch of School of Greatness before the first book. And you were getting ready for your launch and that's, you know, I think you had me on the show once and then we were kind of talking about your book launch and stuff.

Way you need to start really softer, like all these things. And he lost all this weight, got skinny, like looked really weird. And then he's, but, but That is.

Who you want to be. And you always said, you're like, I'm gonna be a New York Times bestselling author. And now we know, do you mind me sharing? Have you shared the 100 million? People know, yeah, yeah, but you can share it. Okay, so for those of you listening, and what? He fired them and said, you know what?

If I'm gonna do this business, I'm gonna do it my way. See?

People have heard in the past, yeah. That one of the things that we got crystal clear on when you and.

I were which is like becoming more of me. Like amplifying the...

I spent two days together and AJ and Matt and all four of us were there. Was that the School of Greatness podcast is gonna get a hundred million downloads.

Yeah.

A hundred million. And when you get to a hundred million, like you're gonna be that person.

Rockness. Like they told him not to use the rock. They'd use Dwayne Johnson as his name. He's like, you know what? I'm going back to who I am. making about the people, like getting bigger and stronger.

And again, part of where I loved this for you was, you know, we talk about what business are you in, how do you make money and all that sort of stuff, but I kind of knew that we hit it for you when you were like, I don't care about the money. Like, if we hit 100 million downloads, it'll work out. I want to impact 100 million lives. And that was what like you you came alive like you said it and you came alive way more than money right would ever inspire you and so you know, that's I know that's part of your future bio yeah, like whatever.

It is is his thing look how that's worked out and Today he just posted that he was the highest paid actor of all time in this is.

A hundred million downloads.

We're close. I know close man. We're gonna we're at 70 plus million right now.

I mean you're gonna hit 100 million and then it's gonna... Then the goal is 100 million in a year.

And then 100 million a month. 100 million a week.

100 million in a week.

That's gonna be a lot.

It's huge. That's a lot.

It's a lot. But it might take some time.

But you're one year.

I think that was right. Was at the highest paid actor like 112 million in one year of all time, the greatest actors ever.

You're building an audience and here's the thing. You have And this is worth noting, we'll come back to the helix, but this is all related. Because you spent such a long time building a great reputation, reputation doesn't grow linearly. It grows.

She is the highest paid.

And otherwise he would have been like everybody else and he would have, you know.

Yeah, maybe he would have done okay.

Yeah.

But he wouldn't have...

Goes exponentially. It kind of hits a hockey stick. Yeah, it's a hockey stick. It's slow, but man, you're hitting that curve. We'll talk about the yes/no list with you. One of the things we decided with you was we realized... Been different. It's celebrating what makes you especially you. And that's what people are drawn to. Like that there's some things you've been doing that you need to let go of. because you're no longer competing with people who do that. You're competing with Oprah, and you're competing with Ellen, and you're competing with Rock. I mean, that's what-- that's what I.

Want to be stepping into.

That's what you're stepping into. That's part of the Lewis Howes future bio. So anyway, you know, people know. I was-- and, you know, like I know when I see you, you're always in a t-shirt and you always-- that's what, you know, what are you the expert on? And, you know, some people, they're-- that's.

The problem you're solving. I think it's important for people to get clear on the exact problem because there's lots of problems that I could be solving as well.

Yeah.

And you're going to be solving multiple problems as well. But what's the number one problem that you're going to focus on?

We were the same cologne. That's like one thing I always know. It's good. But you are you. And when people see me, it's like I'm in a pocket square.

And then there's other things you'll be solving along the way. Focusing on the number one thing is key.

-So, that also helps you define what we call your core audience. -And I have a flower. It's because I was raised by a single mom target. Once you're clear on the problem, you know exactly who you're going after.

-Find those people with that problem.

-Yes.

-That'S it.

You don't have to market to everyone anymore. -Yes. Which is what we do. Who sold Mary Kay and like, you know, I get manicures and pedicures. I spend all sorts of some money on silly stuff. We don't track it. And when you do, like... -It's your style. -It's who I am. It's just who I am. When you go after a core target.

Audience... -You build a community of people too. -You do. -Who are like raving fans because they.

All have like the same beliefs, right? -Yeah. -They all share it. And you do hit, you know, it's like a target. And I think that's what's amazing is... And here's the challenge too. So, There is a part of this that is invigorating. That's why we use core target audience because you're aiming at the bullseye. Now you're going to... into your spirit. There's also a part of this impact other people also. You're going to reach some other people but if you don't know where the bullseye is, you're just throwing darts with your eyes closed. So you have to have that core and all that that is dominating as a business strategy. because the challenge, you know, kind of connected to the brand Helix. So then the next one, so the corresponding internal part here is, and this is a Dave Avrin question, as he used to ask me, he'd say, Rory, what have you earned the right to talk about? So this is related to expertise. Expertise is external. Today is noise.

So much noise.

So much. perceived. But this question is more about what have you actually done?

What have you done? So I've written a New York Times best-selling book. So you've got the credibility, content, everyone's posting every day time to talk about.

Yes. Yeah.

You've done, you've built a podcast.

You could talk about that. You're in shape. You could talk about that, right? Like you could do and this is it. So how do you, how do you break through the noise? because was your problem, which we need to talk to when we get about the yes/no list, is the more successful you become... You're talking about lots of stuff. More stuff, there's lots of stuff to talk about. And that's why getting centered and being clear becomes... The more well-known you become, the more important it is to be clear on this stuff. There's always somebody that's gonna be smarter than you. There's always someone who's funnier than you.

Better looking. Better looking.

So important. Because as your star rises, Rises, there's just more opportunity for distraction and for, you know, dilution in terms of where you spend your time.

I think Warren Buffett was the one who said the key between the difference between the successful people and really successful people.

Looking better connected, has more money to do whatever. And I think the thing that you see is when a celebrity, grows, it's because they're... -Is that really successful?

People say no more than anyone else or something like that. -Yeah.

I don't know if that was exactly... -Well, and no, we can... This is good to talk about the yes-no list because so we did this is we went through with you and Matt and we made it, we made a... It's not a complicated exercise. -Chart. -Yes.

-No.

-But... -What do we say yes to? What do we say no to? -Well, and it's not just what do you say yes to and what you say no to? It's what are the characteristics of things you say yes to and what are the characteristics of things you say no to?

For example.

For example, being raw and authentic and it's themself and you want to talk about yours?

Yeah, give a few.

Okay.

Give a few of the higher level ones. Yeah.

And that is what people are drawn to because we live in this world of tremendous fakeness, right? I mean, We have these masks and we wear masks and we do it because we're completely insecure. So let's talk about the nos first because we'll talk about the yeses and we can share the dares. Because that'll be, I think that'll be cool for people. So one of the things we got clear on for you is that anything that info marketers do, trying to fit in. We're trying to fit in. We're totally insecure and like, right, You.

Know, and a personal brand should be about standing out.

Yes.

Not fitting in. It should be about how do you stand out more?

Yes.

And you talk about this in the brand Helix. Can you break it down?

Generally speaking is going to be a no for you moving forward.

Yes, moving forward.

Yeah. Because when we looked at the future of the Lewis Howes brand, we said Lewis Howes isn't competing with the world of the info marketers. Nothing wrong with the world of info marketers.

Brand Builders Group lives if you want.

To draw for yourself. Yeah, so I'll kind of like try.

To draw it out.

So explain it. If you think about brand DNA, right? So we kind of thought of like, you know, a chromosome sort of a looking thing. So this isn't the world's perfect drawing. But, you know, if you think about kind of like a chromosome in that space, right? And we follow a lot of people in that space and we promote a lot of people in that space. But once we got clear that the podcast is the focus of your brand and that is all in for the future, then we realized, okay, you're going to not do some of the things. And these aren't the only, these aren't like the only questions. These are just questions really that mentors, my mentors asked me that helped me kind of get that those folks do.

-Right. -And that... -It doesn't mean not applying online marketing strategies to my business.

-Correct.

But it's not doing what other info marketers are doing to be well-known info marketers.

And there's certain things that get clear and I always think about and I think these are questions anybody, there's maybe certain tactics that you won't do because listening this is okay, I have a personal brand, I want to grow it or I want to build a purpose, they don't fit with just the direction of your brand. And that's okay, right? Like my job is never to make a judgment on what people decide to do or not do. It's just to help a brand or you're an executive of a company or something and it's like, okay, I want to help them get clear on going, okay, these kinds of tactics fit. I want to use my brand to grow my business. Is you ask yourselves these questions and so these kinds don't and we have to make and we're going to make a decision based on the character first question. where all personal branding starts is just heuristics on our no list of what we do and don't do. Here's another diagram. So, we created this recently and I haven't shown you this. So, this is interesting. So, this is a Venn diagram. I think it's called a Venn diagram. It's three circles. Just getting clear on this. And this is from my man, David Avrin. And David Avrin mentored me from like the time I was super young and he said, Rory, you have to get crystal clear on what problem do you solve? And so, what you have to do is you have to... There's these three circles. There's marketing that works. So, there's principles of marketing that works. Then there is marketing That's ethical. What problem do you solve? The way that Dave said it is he said, To what question? And then there is marketing. Are you the answer? And until you that is aligned. And so there's marketing tactics that work get clear on the problem you solve. Fancy drawings. If you guys are watching on video, you get absorbed by the noise. So, marketing that works, there's things you can do with marketing that works, right? You can tell people, we only have 10 left. In reality, -It's unlimited. -It's unlimited. So you have to reconcile that with marketing that is because you're out there talking about, you know, we do this and we do that and we do this. But the moment you start promoting the problem, promoting the question ethical, right? Now for you, you might not have an ethical problem with that. And if you don't, fine. That's your thing, right? Like this is not an ethics coaches, that is when people start to pay attention because now it's, but for your brand, you got to draw a line and say, I will do this, I won't do that, so you got to reconcile that with what's ethical. But then there's this whole other piece like, whoa, this person can help me solve a problem. So you have to get really clear on like what piece, which is marketing that is aligned with my uniqueness, with my future, with my mission. And so This is where you want to live.

Sweet spot.

Right in the sweet spot. Because you need to do stuff that works. Little stuff. Small decisions. What problem do you solve? You know, then the next question, that decision where you say, I will sacrifice revenue before I sacrifice is, what are you passionate about? And there's two parts of this sort of brand helix. So sacrifice my reputation. And let's talk about the science of making those decisions. So, how do you know? The only way you know is to feel it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you do that.

When he said it, I was like, yeah, but... And I'm telling you like a little lie, you know? It's like a little...

The top part here, this is all sort of external facing, so this is like how... A little bit off. And I think people sense it. What happens is when you start to make you appear or occur in the world, And then this bottom part is one compromise. Then it's easier to make the next, then it's easier to make the next, and then it's easier to make the next. When you... I think what happens there, it's almost like a continuum. All right, I've got more diagrams coming to me as we're talking this out. It's internal. So this is more like your internal monologue, like your psychographics. And these correspond with each other. So the problem, it's almost like you have a continuum. And on one end of the continuum is, this is it, integrity. Okay? On the other end, problem I solve, because there may be many problems you solve, right? Like you can teach people how to do of the continuum. Let's just say it's compromise. And your reputation is somewhere on this continuum. all sorts of different stuff.

But what's the thing you're passionate about as well?

And when they... And every single decision that you make, every single choice, even the ones that nobody else knows about except for you, is either moving your...

Intersect, that's when it's a sweet spot.

Bingo. Right, yeah. So that's when you're on the continuum closer to full integrity, which we're looking for is the intersection of the external sort of who you were designed, which is somebody who has full integrity, is fully aligned, find who the world needs you to be, and who, full authenticity, they don't have insecurity, and so they can be fully themselves and express themselves in the rawness which people are drawn to, or you compromise. And as you compromise, your reputation, your personal brand, your identity, starts to become unclear and the more you compromise the more you compromise. So here's something I don't mind sharing this publicly because this is something you inspired. Who you were designed to be. Who you love being.

Who you love being.

So for me to do was, I don't think I was ever an alcoholic. I don't. But there was a time here a couple years ago when I realized it was like I was drinking too much. Just drinking too much, right? Like I'm keynoting, I'm speaking at all these events, like 60 events a year, and so I'm flying in first class and then you get there and the client takes you to dinner and then you know, you're back whatever and it's just it's easy to have a couple drinks. Have a couple drinks every night. And then I know what problem do I solve? The next thing is sort of what am I perceived as an expert on? And expertise is interesting. because expertise is really more about perception. Remember when I met you in person for the first time and we went out and you know, you didn't have anything to drink and I was like, that's wild. And then we had that dinner that night at Michael Hyatt's house. And it was... You remember that? It was Donald Miller and Michael Hyatt and... -Right.

What do people think I'm an expert at?

-Yes. Like you introduced me, I think you Josh Axs and Jeff Goines and John Acuff, Jeremy Cowart.

The Nashville Mafia.

The Nashville Mafia. And, you know, like everybody, I don't know if everybody, you know, Rory's a New York Times bestselling author, right? So why do you choose to say that? Because people was, but most people were drinking it and you weren't. And I think, you know, we, I asked you, I was like, so what's with the drinking thing? And you were just like, I just hear that and they go, ah, expert, credible, right? That's something that you get and there's a certain type of person that takes a lot of work to get that. Don't do it. And there was something about you doing it and there were a few other people in my life too, but when I saw that it was okay for you not to do it, it was like it gave me permission to let it go. And then So there's these triggers that we kind of think through. We walk people. You know, when AJ told me we were pregnant and we were having a baby.

It was a no-brainer.

It was like, okay, so she's not gonna drink, so I'll just do this with her and through this actually. What are the triggers of what make you perceived as an expert? And one of the extra, so cold turkey, you know, we had one glass of champagne that night. We found out. And then we went cold turkey and then after the exercises we take people through, I actually don't think we did this with you. So Jasper is 16 months old now and I just, but we write your bio. He's never went back. And then we do what's called your future bio.

Interesting, I like that.

And so the way that you said it, if I remember right, and this is the part that was powerful for me, was you said, if I look at just alcohol, and again, if you drink alcohol, this isn't like, I don't want you to feel bad, I'm not campaigning for anything, and whatever. I'm just saying, what you, we think, we asked the question, five years from now, you made a decision for yourself, where you said, what does your bio need to be? And that's actually how we met. 'Cause you and I met before the launch of School of Greatness, before the first book, and you were getting ready for your launch, and that's, you know, I think you'd had me on the show once, and then we were kind of talking about your book launch and stuff. I don't think alcohol helps me-- Didn't serve me.

Inspire people.

Didn't serve me. Didn't serve you. Or serve humanity. Didn't serve your ability to serve people. And so when you said that, it forced me to kind of go like, to have, you know, pun intended, a sobering conversation about like, but that is who you want to be. And you always said, you're like, I'm gonna be a New York Times bestselling author. And now we know, do you mind me sharing? Have you shared the 100 million? Okay, is this making me better or is it not? And the scary part for me, Louis, is that, you know, I have a decent reputation, I think, but I've done some really stupid stuff. Some really bad stuff. And when I've looked back over my life... -People know.

Yeah, yeah, but you can share it.

-Okay. So, for those of you listening and watching... -People have heard in the past, yeah. -That one of the things that we got crystal clear on when you and I... One of the things that was in common in almost all of them was that I was drunk. -Wow. -And that was like, wow. Like when you ask that question, is it serving me? And so, you know, whether it's marketing or it's a life style choice or decision. It's just about you. I spent two days together and AJ and Matt and like we all four of us were there was that the School of Greatness podcast is going to get a hundred million downloads. Yeah. A hundred million. And when you get to a hundred million, like you're going to be that person, you being intentional about choosing who you're going to be.

Yeah, that's it. Listen, I'm the king of ice cream. So that doesn't serve me.

Yeah, that's right. So you told me, you know the sugar.

You and I both have the sugar problem. But I go on waves of it where it's like, okay, I'm focused for a while, not having it, and then.

I'll have some every now and then. So it's like you gotta, and again.

Part of where I, what I loved this. Pick and choose your own personal battles.

Yeah. That's my battle, is like. Yeah, although Danielle Natoni, you know, a mutual friend you introduced us to, she's a client of a brand builders group. So, she shared some stuff with me that's got me like, now I'm working on the sugar. I'm trying to cut it down.

She's good at that.

And she's good at that. And I was like, ah, damn. That's good.

That's good.

Okay, so let's go back to for you was, you know, we talk about what business are you in, how you make money and all that sort of stuff. But I kind of knew that we hit it for you when you were like, I don't care about the money. If we hit a hundred million downloads, it'll work out. I want to impact a hundred million lives. So, the yes, no list and oh, the yes list. You want to talk about the...

So the no list is getting clear on like what you are not going to do anymore, moving forward what you're not going to do. And I did, and actually also in my no list was like, I'm not going to speak for less than my rate anymore.

And that was what like you came alive. Like you said it.

Which before I was making compromises all the time. I was like, I'll do it for half the rate.

And you came alive way more than money would ever inspire.

This because it's money there. And I don't leave money on the table, right? And I could use that for my team or production or whatever it may be. And I started getting clear like, this is the rates. This is why you.

And so, you know, I know that's part of your future bio. Yeah. It's a hundred million downloads. We're close.

I know. We're at 70 plus what it is, otherwise I'm not doing it. And that clarity has just allowed us to say yes and no quickly to all the inbound opportunities of speaking gigs. So that's just one thing. And we're still getting clear on a lot of things that we see a yes and no to. But I think it's important for you to create a list, yes, something right now.

I mean, you're gonna hit a hundred million and then it's gonna be... Then.

The goal is a hundred million in a year. and then 100 million a month. 100 million a week.

100 million in a week.

That's gonna be a lot.

It's huge. That's a lot.

It's a lot. But it takes some time. But you're gonna do these things when it does this or no, I won't do when it does this. And so, the yes list. Is that what you're saying next?

Oh, dares. Yeah, I was gonna talk about that. But one thing I wanted to just say on the topic of no, because this is powerful. You know, the word no creates margin and it takes incredible confidence to say no. You're building an audience and here's the thing, you have... And this is so hard. And it takes not just confidence but perspective.

And say no to money.

Money is one of the biggest lures of compromise in the world. Like money is one of the biggest things that can pull you away from integrity. Is to just, there's opportunity to make money here. And so this is worth noting. We'll come back to the helix but this is all related. Because you've spent such a long time building a great reputation, reputation doesn't grow linearly. It grows always have to be playing the long game. And that's something that, you know, all these people you have on your show, like all these successful people, those exponentially. And so it's kind of hits a hockey stick. They're always playing the long game. Always the long game. It's the probably the single greatest difference I think between, you know, Most everyone and the ultra successful, the ultra successful are playing the long game. So, getting clear on what you say no to. Oh, yeah, it's a hockey stick. It's slow, but man, you're hitting that curve. So, what do we say yes to? Do you want to go through that?

You want to talk about the dares?

Go ahead.

Yeah, let's do it. Dares. Dares.

This is the thing I was telling you guys in the beginning that is... Perk. Right? And we'll talk about the yes, no list with you and we... Powerful game changer. So this is, I think we, one of the things we decided with you was we got, we realized in terms of what do we say yes to, you want me to draw it out?

You can draw it out and then I can show it.

That there's some things you've been doing that you need to let go of because you're no longer backwards, but yeah, while you're speaking. So, yeah, it helps me. I feel more at home as a speaker, like, oh, this is my whiteboard. Trainer, I feel good, yeah. Okay, so dares are, Basically, when it's.

The framework for what you should be thinking about when launching a product or service, is that right?

It's, yes. These were things on our yes list, like as I was thinking about competing with people who do that, you're competing with Oprah and you're competing with Ellen and you're competing with Rock. I mean, that's what I want to be stepping into. That's what you're about, the future of my life and me and AJ and say, okay, we're gonna build Brand Builders Group. We're gonna What are you stepping into? That's part of the Lewis Howes future bio. So anyway, what are the things that we're going to do in terms of how we spend our time building business? Yes and no. And we noticed like, okay, these are some characteristics of things we're into. So, you know, this isn't like the end all be all list. But this is, we live in a world where this is possible more than ever. So the D is, that's what you know, what are you the expert on? And you know, some people, they're experts. Things that are digital. Right? Like you can have a business without having a warehouse. You can have a business without having a storefront. You can have a business without even having inventory today.

Nothing. Yeah.

Digital.

So the A is... And why digital for you?

Just because... -I want it... -When you.

Don'T have open you're solving. I think it's important for people to get clear on the exact problem because there's lots of problems that I could be solving as well. -Yeah. -And you're going to be solving multiple problems as well. But what's the number one problem that you're going to focus on overhead? When you don't have to have that.

Extra overhead, might as well do it. -Well, and again... -Less logistics, all that stuff. -Yeah. And if you just think about all of this in the context of it empowers you to serve people, right? Anything that creates mental or emotional space.

And then there's other things you'll be solving along the way but focusing on the number one thing is key.

Gives you more power to serve other people.

Yeah.

So, anything that's not tying me up, whether it's money or time or resources or just even emotional like baggage, anything that's not tying me up is margin that I can reinvest to doing the things. So, that also helps you define what we call your core audience target. Once you're clear on the problem, you know exactly who you're going after.

Find those people with that problem. Yes.

That's it.

You don't have to market to everyone anymore.

Yes. Which is what we do that I love making a difference, like giving out there in the message. So that's digital. Yeah. And from a financial strategy from just, you know, business, it's like, you know, you don't have profitable. Yeah. And for, you know, it's, it's working capital is the term that, like, entrepreneurs use. Working capital is the amount of cash tied up in it. We spend all sorts of money on silly stuff, we don't track it. And when you're in the business of just running the business, so when people owe you accounts receivable, like they owe you, when you go after a core.

Target audience, you build a community of people too.

You do?

Who?

Money, that's money that you should have that you don't have. And when you have inventory, it's cash that's in inventory that you can't use. That's working capital. So when you have digital stuff, you don't have as much of that. So the A is automated.

We are like raving fans because they all have like the same beliefs, right?

They all share it. And you do hit, you know, it's like a target. Automated, automated, automated. And we live in a world of automation. That's why we use core target audience because you're aiming at the bullseye. Now you're gonna... You know, I did a whole TED talk on this, which you can... On multiplying your you can go check that out. And one of the things to me that I've realized here is that compounding interest impact other people also. You're going to reach some other people, but if you is a way that you sort of leverage money. If you don't know where the bullseye is, you're just throwing darts with your eyes closed. So you have to have that core and all that's did and then it grows. Well, in today's world, because we live in a world of where things can be automated, automation is a way that you leverage time. And so you, when you do something and you automate it, then it's like, it's, you know, kind of connected to the, to the brand Helix.

Right.

So then the next one, kind of about compounding interest would, will work all day, every day when you automate. So the corresponding internal part here is. is, and this is a Dave Avrin question, something that's the same thing. And there's more tools, you know, now. Right.

Software and everything else.

Yeah, so we're looking for things that are digital, automated. The R is recurring.

Huge.

Recurring.

And a friend of mine, Bedros, I don't know if you know Bedros Kouyoumjian.

Oh, well I know him just from seeing him on your show. He used to ask me, he said, Rory, what have you earned the right to talk about. So this is related to expertise. Expertise is external. Show and social media.

He did a post, yeah, a couple days ago, where it's like three principles to building a business. He's built this huge franchise, fit body boot camp business. I mean, I can't remember how many 500 or a thousand locations.

It's perceived. But this question is more about what if...?

Around the world, probably more than that. he was throwing out a big number. And he was like, you actually died. What have you done? So I've written a New York Times best selling book. So you've got the credibility. My three rules of building a successful business, one of them was every product or service should be recurring. He's like, that's one of his three principles to a successful business, like recurring revenue. He's like, even if you don't think.

It could have talked about.

Yes.

Yeah.

You've done, you've built a podcast.

You could talk about that. You're in shape. You could talk about that, right? You could do, and this could be.

Recurring, it can be. Like repackaging it, repositioning it.

Was your problem, which we need to talk to when we get about the yes/no list, is the more successful you.

Become, so that you acquire a customer one time and they pay you every single month or every single year. But always looking for new customers to make your money is a hard business to be in.

And here's what's interesting about that. It's a hard become.

You're talking about lots of stuff.

More stuff, there's lots of stuff to talk about. Always looking for new customers is a hard interest to be in. And I have a long history and background in sales and not in that world at all anymore. But sales is a lot of stress. A lot. It's a lot.

Knocking on doors.

A lot of pressure to get the next. Always to get the next person. When you have recurring revenue, it frees you up to better serve your customers.

Absolutely.

It's why getting centered and being clear becomes, the more well known you become, the more important it is to be clear on this stuff. You can spend more energy servicing your existing customers because... That's so important. Because as your star like rises, there's and you know, financially from a business valuation standpoint, I don't want to get into too much of it but you know, normally the way a business is valued, like how much is a business worth is you got revenue expenses and profit and most businesses are valued as just more opportunity for distraction and for you know, dilution, multiple of profit. It's so like a five multiple if you had 100,000 in profit in terms of where you spend your time.

I think Warren Buffett was the one who said the key between the difference between the successful people and really successful people.

At a five multiple is 500,000. It's just saying how many years into the future, it's an estimation of future cash flows. Well anyways, recurring business.

If you don't have recurring then you can't sell it for as much of a multiple.

Well, yeah, because recurring companies... Is that.

Really successful people say no more than anyone else?

Are valued on the top line, on revenues. So instead of, you know, like let's say you had $1,000 in revenues, 900 in expenses, and $100 in profit. And a five multiple on earnings would be only 500. But when it's a recurring revenue, a lot of times it's valued on the top line.

Or something like that. I don't know if that was exactly.

Well, and no, we can turn this is good to talk about five times a thousand as it's 5,000 versus 500. It's about the yes/no list because so we did this is we went through with you and Matt and we made it, we made a, it's not a complicated exercise chart. It's a chart and 10 times the valuation. But you know, beyond that, you may not ever be looking to sell a business or something, but you it frees you from stress, which leads to the next one, which is Evergreen. Yes, no.

But-- what do we say yes to? What do we say no to?

Well, and it's not just what you-- Evergreen. Now, there's a lot to be said, you know, this one especially, it's worth a caveat that there's a lot to be said for the power of a launch.

Yes. And something comes out, the anticipation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, movies, They do huge launches, right? Artists do big tours. Authors, right? We do the book launch. You say yes to and what you say no to. It's what are the characteristics of things you say yes to. And a lot of people do product launches and stuff.

Bringing the awareness out there, the attention, the book.

And what are the characteristics of things you say no to?

For example.

For example, you want to talk about yours?

Yeah, give a few.

Okay.

Give a few of the high level ones.

Yeah. Let's talk about the nos first because we'll talk about the yeses and we can share the dares. Yeah. But a launch is very stressful. A lot of energy.

It always is. And if you live and die by a launch without having the rest of this afterwards, then that's a hard business.

Yeah, you're just, you're always like, you're either going into a launch or in a launch, you're coming out of launch. Yeah. The nice thing about evergreen and recurring is like, okay, we're building a steady snowball and it's like we can, we can, you know, Breathe a little bit. We can love on our people and not always be we could take care of our existing customers and not always have to just be thinking about selling the next one, right? So I love evergreen because that'll be I think that'll be cool for people. Yeah. So one of the things we got clear on for you is that anything green? Yeah. So there's time to do a launch and the one thing I will say about this is it's almost like that info marketers do Yeah. Generally speaking is gonna be a no for you moving forward. There is this breakthrough point that you need to do a launch, at least one big launch to break through and then sort of become known. And then once you're on the other side of that, you can sort of, you know, chill out a little bit. And then the last...

Yes, moving forward.

Yeah. Because, When we looked at the future of the Lewis Howes brand, we said Lewis Howes isn't competing with the world of the info marketers. Nothing wrong with the world of info marketers. Brand Builders Group lives. The last S there is scalable. Is scalable. I'm looking for things that are infinitely scalable, that they will grow, and you don't ever get capped. Right. Right? So if I'm, if I am, I don't know what is an example of something that's not scalable, but something that's really just really, really hard, really, really big, is, takes a lot of energy, it's just not super, super scalable. So you always want to be thinking.

What can I, what can I systematize so that I can duplicate over and over, right?

Yes.

-And scale it up.

-Yeah. -Well, and if you're if you are building a personal brand like a lot of you listening, if you're in that space of going, okay, I want to build a personal brand, then what do I do or how do I make money at it? It's kind of a one to many. You're trying to figure out a way. Well, here's an example of something that's not scalable. You doing one-on-one phone calls.

-Yeah, that's not scalable. -It's not scalable.

You can only talk to so many.

-So many. What's scalable to a A point, and then it's not.

Right.

So scale it up to 10 hours a day.

Yeah, like however many hours you want to spend doing, but that's gonna create, it's gonna create a, you know, it's gonna lock down your cap.

Yeah, exactly. So again, to repeat that, these are dares. This is what everyone should be thinking about in running the perfect business.

We think this is the future. Yeah.

The future. Something that's digital, automated, recurring, evergreen and scalable. and obviously physical goods is eliminating that. So if you have supplements or clothing or beauty products, it's not digital.

Yeah, now and here's the thing, I don't know that I found any business that hits all five of these. So it's more like what's the most that you can hit?

Yeah, yeah. Try to do as many as you can.

As many as you can, yeah. So like vitamins, okay, a good example. So the nice thing about vitamins, anything that's a consumable product, It's recurring. Is recurring. by definition.

You can automate the process of it.

Both selling it and delivering it, right? You can have people on a monthly auto ship.

You can have evergreen, you can scale it up.

And it can scale pretty nicely.

It's not digital. It's not digital.

So four out of five. It's pretty good.

It's pretty good. It's pretty good. So you look at... A membership site.

Is probably a digital membership site is probably one that fits this. Digital membership sites do fit this.

The challenge with membership sites is the recurring Keeping people in.

It's keeping people in. It's like, yeah, they stay 3.4 months or whatever.

Finding that, like, whatever that is that people need to stay in for, which is usually adding like a software component or something else or helps them.

Or a human touch.

Human touch.

Or a physical good.

Or a physical good that's not digital anymore.

Yeah, or an experience, like a community experience, like a live event, like a live event or something, right? You get free tickets which is no.

Longer digital, but that's pretty much, yeah.

You're going for as many as you can.

You're going for as many as you can.

You're going for as many as you can. And part of this is all of this is all of these are vehicles, these are all vehicles for you to be more of who you were designed to be.

That's it. And again, if we're thinking about building a personal brand with DARES, it's like For me, by going through this process, I learned more and more about my uniqueness. My uniqueness is not, at this moment at least, is not managing and building some massive team. And me in the weeds of managing people all day long, it's about the relationships, building relationships with other influencers, creating great content, speaking, whatever it may be, doing those things, promoting a message. and trying to help the masses. And so I shouldn't be building a business or a product that requires me to do things that isn't my uniqueness.

That's what we uncovered.

And bringing in other partners or team members to help manage and facilitate those aspects of the product or services that we're doing. And I think that's important for everyone in order to go through this process.

Whatever your staff is, whatever your team is, should support very specifically what your main thing is. And then everything else, you should either get a referral, you should just get a referral partner, right? Like affiliate commissions or referral partners, that's a great thing. Or just have people you trust that you recommend or you just say no. That's the other thing is you can just say no.

-Because like you said before, the bigger your reach gets, the more opportunities to make money. that, you know, I could create a t-shirt line, a shoe company, I don't know. -You could.

You could launch a restaurant right now. -A soap company.

-You can start a real estate company. -Anything, right? You could start lots of different things and go into that. But you have to ask yourself, well, what is your passion as well? -Right. -Your expertise and your passion, do they lie into those things? Just because you can do them to make money, should you? And is that going to pull you away from the deeper focus that you have. And I think that's the challenge. The bigger your audience gets and the more success you have, there's opportunities to partner with lots of different things and start all these products and services. And what you're saying is to partner with people as referral partners and just work off of a commission or affiliate deals or something and not do those things. Yeah. Let someone else do them. Or just say no completely and focus on your lane. Did you say you want to say something else to that?

No, that is spot on. It is the confidence to be able to say no.

And I think we should go into what business are you in, which is the revenue streams. Have we talked about that yet?

Not really. So that's in that space, right? And we follow a lot of people in that space and we promote a lot of people in that space. But once we got clear that the podcast is the focus of your brand and that is all in for the future, Then we realized, okay, you're gonna not do some of the things that those folks do.

-Right. -And that doesn't mean not applying online marketing strategies to my business.

-Correct.

-But it's not doing what other info marketers are doing to be well-known info marketers.

-Yeah. -And there's certain things, there's maybe certain tactics that you won't do because they don't fit with just the direction of your brand. and that's okay, right? Like my job is never to make a judgment on what people decide to do or not do. It's just to help them get clear on going, okay, these kinds of tactics fit, these kinds don't, and we're gonna make a decision based on the characteristics on our no list of what we do and don't do. Here's another diagram, so we created this Recently, and I haven't shown you this. So this is interesting. So this is a Venn diagram. I think it's called a Venn diagram. It's three circles. And so what you have to do is you have to, there's these three circles. There's marketing that works. So there's principles of marketing that works. Then there is marketing That's ethical. And then there is marketing that is aligned. And so there's marketing tactics that work. See if there's fancy drawings. If you guys are watching on the video. So, marketing that works, there's things you can do with marketing that works. Right? You can tell people we only have 10 left. In reality, you have... It's unlimited.

It's unlimited.

So you have to reconcile that with marketing that is ethical. Now for you, you might not have an ethical problem with that. And if you don't, fine. That's your thing, right? Like this is not an ethics course. But for your brand, you got to draw a line and say, I will do this, I won't do that. So you've got to reconcile that with what's ethical. But then there's this whole other piece, which is marketing that is aligned with my uniqueness, with my future, with my mission. And so this is where you want to live.

Sweet spot.

Right in the sweet spot. Because you need to do stuff that works. There's small decisions. That decision where you say, I will sacrifice revenue before I sacrifice my reputation. And let's talk about the science of making those decisions. So, how do you know? The only way you know is to feel it. -Yeah, absolutely. -And you do that.

-When he said it, I was like, yeah. But I'm telling you like a little lie. You know, it's like a little bit off.

-And I think people sense it. What happens is when you start to make... That was a good one. So, that's one of the exercises that...

-This is an exercise that anyone could do right now at home.

-Yeah, this is a great one.

If you've got a pen and paper.

I mean, all these are pretty like one compromise. Then it's easier to make the next.

You could do all these. But if you want to do this one, you essentially just write down a list of all the revenue streams from top highest earning.

Then it's easier to make the next and then it's easier to make the next. When you, I think what happens there, it's almost like a continuum. All right, I've got, I've got more diagrams. as we're talking right now.

It's the lowest earning, is that right?

Yep. Yep. So, this is one that, you know, you just basically go revenue streams at the top. Yep. And just, you just brainstorm them. So, step one is just, what are all speaking, books, courses, events, whatever.

Membership, yeah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, whatever. We sell t-shirts. Like, whatever your revenue streams. It's almost like you have a continuum. And on one end of the continuum, Continuum is, this is it, integrity. On the other end of the Continuum, let's just say it's compromise.

Just write them all down.

Just write them all down. And then what you do is you do two rounds, and your reputation is somewhere on this Continuum. And every single decision that you make, every single choice, even the ones that nobody else knows about except for you, is either moving you on the continuum closer to full integrity, which rankings?

Oh, this is great. There's one through five, right?

Two rankings.

Oh, this, I forgot about this. This is the key.

Oh my gosh. The first ranking is somebody who has full integrity, is fully aligned, full authenticity, they don't have insecurity, and so they can be fully themselves and express themselves in the rawness which people are drawn to or you compromise. And as you compromise, your reputation, your personal brand, your identity starts to become unclear and the more you compromise, the more you compromise. So here's something I don't mind sharing this publicly because this is something you inspired me to do was I don't I don't think I was ever an alcoholic. I don't. But there was a time here a couple years ago when I realized it was like I was drinking too much. Just drinking too much, right? Like I'm keynoting, I'm speaking at all these events, like 60 events a year, and so I'm flying in first class and then you get there and the client takes you to dinner and then you know you're back, whatever, and it's just it's easy to have a couple drinks. Have a couple drinks every night. And I remember when I met you in person for the first time. And we went out and you know you didn't have anything to drink and I was like, that's wild. And then we had that dinner that night at Michael Hyatt's house. And it was, you remember that? It was Donald Miller and Michael Hyatt and Josh Axe and Jeff Goins and John Acuff, Jeremy Cowart.

The Nashville Mafia.

The Nashville Mafia. And you know like everybody, I don't know if everybody was but most people were drinking it and you weren't. And I think, you know, we, I asked you, I was like, so what's with the drinking thing? And you were just like, I just don't do it. Yeah. And there was something about you doing it. And there were a few other people in my life too, but when I saw that it was okay for you not to do it, which one is the largest? Right. And so a lot of times people will say, oh, I'm in the XYZ business. But when they do this exercise, I'm.

In the speaking business. or the book business. -The revenue tells a different story.

-Yeah. -It's like, oh, you say you're in this business, you might even present yourself.

-Say you're a speaker, but really you're in the events business or the book business. -The book business. -It's getting crazy.

-It'S all good. Yeah.

So that's the thing. It's figuring out the revenue stream and figuring out what business you're in based.

On... -Based on the actual dollars. -Exactly. -Just the results. Now, everything we've talked about, we probably should have said this earlier, everything we've talked about today happens in the context always of who you are now and also who you want to be. It's what is your current bio, like, you know, how can you package yourself to be perceived as an expert today? And then it is, what is your future bio?

So, the business you're in right now may be based on the highest revenue that you have, the revenue stream, but it doesn't mean that's where you need to be.

I mean, it doesn't-- Long term. Yeah.

But you need to be clear-- you-.

Understand where you're at. Today. Right. And a lot of times we don't and we don't operate accordingly. We think to ourselves, you know, this is the-- and this is all inspired to me by the like McDonald's story. Of course. It's like classic MBA school story is they say, you know, I guess it was Ray Crocker or someone was talking to a business class And Ray Croc asks the class, what business am I in?

They're like, hamburger business.

Yeah, it was like it gave me permission to let it go. And then, I'm in the hamburger business. Restaurants and you know, and he goes, no, no, no, no. And you know, when AJ told me we were pregnant and we were having a baby, it was a no-brainer. It was like, okay, so she's not gonna drink, so I'll just do this with her. And he says, how many of you can make a better hamburger than me? and they go, well, yeah, of course. Yeah, I can make a better hamburger. So, cold turkey, you know, we had one glass of champagne that night. We're going to McDonald's and he says, that's because I'm not in the hamburger business. I'm in the real estate business.

And he was really clear that's like.

We'Re in the real estate business. And then we went cold turkey and then after the estate business and McDonald's owns real estate on all of the most popular street corners that. So, Jasper is 16 months old now and I just never went back. And I think in the world, right? I mean, that's... But on the surface, now on the surface it's fine if people think you're in one business.

Perception.

It's fine if the perception is that as long as you are the way that you said it, if I remember right. And this is the part that was powerful for me was you said, If I look at just alcohol, and again, if you drink alcohol, this isn't like, I don't want you to feel bad.

I'm not campaigning for anything, and whatever, I'm just saying what you, and your.

Reputation needs to be that we create great hamburgers. Yeah, you made a decision for yourself.

Where you said, I, or we create a great family experience, or whatever it is.

Whatever the reputation, I don't think alcohol helps me, Inspire people, needs to be, or whatever your reputation actually is, is what your reputation is. reputation is. But you need to make sure that your reputation is aligned with what business you're really in. And you either need to... Didn't serve you.

Or serve humanity.

Didn't serve your ability to serve people. And so when you said that, it forced me to kind of go like to have, you know, pun intended, a sobering conversation about like adjust your reputation or adjust the revenue stream. Now, here's the part. It's the second ranking though that's where everything is like, okay, is this making me better or is it not? -It's crazy. -Is all you do... Okay, so you have your... -You rank your revenue streams.

-Revenue, yeah. So, you rank them here. -And the highest revenue stream is actually.

The business that you're currently in. -And the scary part for me, Louis, is that, you know, I have a decent reputation, I think. But I've done some really stupid stuff. Some really bad stuff. And when I've looked back over my life... -And based on revenue... -Just data.

-Just based on that. Doesn't mean that's where you want to be. It's based on where you're at now.

-Yep. -And then the second ranking is... -Is stress. One of the things that was in common in almost all of them was that I was drunk. -This is the stress ranking. And so, all you do is you go each revenue stream and you rank them and you go, okay, on a Scale of one to five. And that was like, wow. Like when you ask that question, is it serving me? And so, you know, whether it's marketing or it's a life style choice or decision, it's just about you at five being incredibly stressful. Like, I hate doing this. And it is, it's horrible.

Sucks the life out of me.

Suck you being intentional about choosing who you're going to be. Fix the life out of it.

I dread it. It's exhausting. I lose sleep over this. Everything. Yeah, that's it. Listen, I'm the king of ice cream.

So that doesn't serve me. Yeah, that's right. So you told me, yeah, it ties up our money or whatever, like just gives you stress. And a woman.

You and I both have the sugar problem. But I go on little waves of it where it's like, okay, I'm focused for a while, not having it, and.

Then I'll have some every now and then. So it's like you got a fun being Man, this is amazing. It's life-giving. I enjoy it. I love it so much. And you just, and that's a one.

Pick and choose your own personal battles.

Yeah.

That's my battle.

Yeah. Although Danielle and the Tony, you know, a mutual friend you introduced us to. She's a client of a brand builders group. So, and you look at what is the stress level and what's crazy is a lot of times you find that the highest stress thing, she shared some stuff with me that's got me like, now I'm working on the sugar. I'm trying to cut it down. She's good at that. She's good at that. And I was like, ah, damn. Like, but it's good.

It's good.

Okay, so you go back to these.

Are producing some of the lowest revenue.

You're like, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Yeah. Makes no sense, but we do it because we think we're supposed to. We do it because everyone else does. So, the yes-no list. Oh, the yes list. You want to talk about the no list?

So the no list is getting clear on like what you are not going to do anymore or moving forward.

What else is doing it? We do it because our colleagues are telling us we need to do it. We're doing it usually out of insecurity. Out of insecurity to just... What you're.

Not going to do. And I did, and I see also in my no list was like, to.

Trust and believe and I'm not going.

To speak for lessening my rate anymore.

Jump blindly and boldly into risking just being the person we were meant to be.

-Which before I was making compromises all the time. I was like, I'll do it for half the rate. That's good. It's really good. So, revenue streams was a big one for this because it's money there. And I don't leave money on the table, right? And I could use that for my team or production or whatever it may be. And I said for us when we did this session for the two days because it helped me gain clarity. I started getting clearer like this is the rates, this is where I'm at, where I want to be, and the things that create a lot of stress and saying, you know what? Maybe we don't have to eliminate them right now because some of them are making good money, but it is otherwise I'm not doing it. And that clarity has just allowed us to say yes and know quickly to all the inbound opportunities of speaking to me, but how can we start transitioning out of them and create a dead links? So that's just one thing. We're still getting clear on a lot of things that we see a yes and no to. I think it's important for you to create a list, yes sign, by when I want to remove these things completely by increasing the revenue on other things so that I don't have to worry about the revenue on something that's creating a lot of stress.

Right.

And that has given a lot of clarity for I'm going to do these things when it does this or no, I won't do when it does this. And so, the yes list, is that what you're saying next?

-Uh, dares. Yeah, I was going to talk about... -Go ahead.

But one thing I wanted to just...

-Me and my brand and my team to be able to move forward in things that we do better. -On the topic of no, because this is powerful.

You know, the word no creates more... -Anyways.

And the things that would be stressful because we thought we're supposed just do them.

-Margin.

-And it takes incredible confidence to say no.

-It'S a really key one. You guys can do this at home.

-Well, when you do all this. And this is one of the things. And this is again, I hope you don't mind me sharing this.

-So hard.

-And it takes not just confidence but perspective.

-And say no to money.

-Money is one of the biggest lures of compromise. -Go ahead. -You know, you called And you came to Nashville and we spent a couple days in the world. Like, money is one of the biggest things that can lays together to try to get clear on like what's the thing you should be all in on. And we talked about all pull you away from integrity is to just there's opportunity to make money here. And so, you always have to be playing the long game. And that's something that you know, all these people you have on your show, like all these successful people. -All this different stuff that you were doing. And at the end of our Two days together. They're always playing the long game. Always the long game. It's probably the single greatest, our great big epiphany was that the one thing that mattered most was what?

The podcast.

The podcast. Difference I think between, you know, most everyone and the ultra successful.

Podcast.

And the podcast wasn't in the conversation really of like, what are, it was the ultra successful are playing the long game. Getting clear on what you say no to. So what do we say yes to? Do you want to go through that? You want to talk about the dares? Go ahead. This is your deal. This is the thing.

Go ahead, yeah, let's do it. Dares.

Dares.

This is the thing I was telling you guys in the beginning that is powerful game changer.

So this is, I think, in terms of what do we say yes to, you want me to draw it out?

You can draw it out and then I can show it.

Louis, you have spent money on Facebook ads for lots of different things in the past, but you shared with me that you had never once spent $1.

While you're speaking.

So, yeah, it helps me. I feel more at home as a speaker. Like, oh, this is my whiteboard. Trainer. I feel good.

Yeah.

Okay, so dares are basically...

It's the framework for what you should be thinking about when launching a product or service. Is that right? Promoting the podcast. Promoting the actual podcast itself.

Well, maybe we can spend a couple dollars, right? It's, yes. These were things on our yes list, like as I was thinking about the future of my life and me and AJ and say, okay, we're gonna build brand builders group.

We're gonna, what's testing, boosting a post, but yeah.

Yeah. To be an integrity of my work.

But compared to other things, Right.

I haven't spent much. few bucks. And what's interesting is it's so it's like, you know, like the podcast isn't necessarily the things that we're going to do in terms of how we spend our time building. Yes and no. Yes and no. And we noticed like, okay, these are some, these are some characteristics of things we're into. So, you know, this isn't like the end all be all list, but this is, we live in a world where this is possible more than ever. So the D is your top revenue stream.

Right.

But once we got clear about your brand DNA and who you were things that are digital. Right?

Like you can have a business without.

Having design to be and then and part of... -And that's why I wasn't focusing.

I mean, it's still a major piece of everything but I didn't think it was the business I was in. -In a warehouse. -You can have a business.

-Without having a storefront. You can have a business without even having... -Because I was generating revenue and other things.

So, we'd spend money on those other things.

-An inventory. today?

-Nothing.

Yeah. -Digital.

So, the A is... -And why digital for you?

-Just because I want...

When you don't have other things to make more. But really like you were saying, overhead, when you don't have that extra overhead, might as well do it. -Well, go ahead and finish your... -Well.

What I was just... Yeah. What I was just going to say is when you get clear on your brand DNA and like, this is your thing. This is... And look, you part of how you know what your thing is.

And again, less logistics, all that stuff.

Yeah, and if you just think about all of this in the context, because it's the thing that's working. Like it's the thing that's working without having to try, without having to spend money on it. It empowers you to serve people, right? Anything that creates anything that creates mental or emotional space gives you more power to serve other people.

Yeah. So anything that thing that's making everything else works.

-Yes, it's like the keystone. It's the cornerstone of everything. And then you go, if you go all in on that thing, you don't have to worry about the money. Like, you know, it's not tying me up. Whether it's money or time or resources or just even emotional like baggage. Anything that's not tying me up, oh, it's going to show up. And especially you just being as heart driven and heart led as you are, is margin that I can reinvest to doing the things that I love, making a difference, like giving out there in a message. So, that's digital. You were just like, I don't even care what the revenue streams are. Like, I know they're going to show up and you just... That's a faith and a trust that you have that if you serve people... And here's the thing about money in general. And I'm not the world's expert on money but I grew up with none of it. Yeah, and from a financial strategy just business, it's like you don't have... -That's profitable. -Yeah. And for, you know, it's working capital is the term that like entrepreneurs use. Working capital is the amount of cash tied up in and then got some of it and have learned, you know, over time how to get more. In the business of just running the business. So when people owe you accounts receivable, like they owe you it, is money is just simply the byproduct of how much value you deliver in the world. and so the fact that you are delivering tons of value without charging money, that's money that you should have, that you don't have, and when you have inventory, it's cash that's in inventory that you can't use, that's working capital. So when you have digital stuff, you don't have as much of that. So the A is automated. Charging for it on the podcast, it's your reputation, it's the reputation formula. It's like the automated, automated, automated. and we live in a world of automation. Results times reach equals reputation. You're having huge reach and so the revenue shows up as a result of building a reputation. The revenue shows up. It may come in different ways. I did a whole TED talk on this which you can... On multiplying your time. You can go check that out. One of the things to me that I've realized here is that compounding interest is... It's one of the things I love about this is a way that you sort of leverage money. You invest it and then it grows. Well, in today's world, because we live in a world generation, speaking of millennials and Gen Z and stuff, of the younger folks is I feel like one of the bright spots of the future is that people aren't as motivated by money in these where things can be automated. Automation is a way that you leverage time. And so, when you do something and you automate it, then it's like these upcoming generations, they're really motivated by just what is fun. kind of about compounding interest would work all day, every day. When you automate, what is cool and what makes a difference in the world? And, you know, there's some negative parts of that, right? But there's some really beautiful parts about that too. It's the same thing. And there's more tools, you know, now.

-Right. -Software and everything else.

-Yeah. So, we're looking for things that are digital, automated. The R is recurring. -To is to go, you know what? Money is not going huge. Uh-huh. Recurring.

And a friend of mine, Bedros Keuilian.

To cause maybe as many people.

I don't know if you know Bedros Keuilian.

Oh, well I know him just from seeing him on the Next Generation to compromise, as it has caused people in previous generations. Show and social media.

He did a post a couple days ago. or it's like three principles to building a business. He's built this huge franchise.

Yeah.

See, man, there's a lot more that I know we could talk about, like brand mantra, fit body boot camp business. I mean, I can't remember how many 500 or a thousand locations and everything else that we haven't covered here, which is, you know, we did a patients around the world, probably more than that. I'm just throwing out a big number. And he was like two day breakdown, which was super powerful. And you've been. doing this for a lot of other people. My three rules of like building a successful business, one of them was, Bull. And I asked you before we jumped on here, if there's something we can give to people, every product or service should be recurring. He was like, that's one of his three principles to be successful business, like recurring revenue. He's like, even if you don't think it could listening or watching on YouTube or on video.

Yeah.

And you said that you wanted to give a free strategy call 30 Minutes maybe more be recurring recurring it can be yeah, like repackaging it reposition to a brand strategy call. Is that right? Yeah, so so that you acquire customer one time and they pay so brand builders group.

Yeah, so this is the business that we're we are in so and every.

Single month or every single year But always looking for new customers and to make your money is a hard business to be in.

And here's what's interesting about that. It's a hard... And AJ and I are partners and we've got some other people on board. We are helping people establish build their personal brands. We're helping them build rock solid reputation. Always looking for new customers is a hard interest to be in. And you know, I have a long history and background in patients and then we're helping them become rich, famous and influential after they've built sales and not in that world at all anymore. But you know, sales is a lot of stress. -A lot.

-It'S a lot.

-Locking on doors. -A lot of pressure to always to get the next person. When you have rock-solid reputation. Right. So, if you want to nurturing revenue, it frees you up to better serve your customers. -Absolutely. -You can spend more energy servicing your existing customers because and you know, financially from a business valuation standpoint, I don't want to get into too much of of it. But you know, normally the way a business is valued, like how much is a business worth is you've got revenue, expenses and profit. And most businesses are valued at a multiple of profit. It's so like a five multiple, if you had a hundred thousand in profit, a five multiple is 500,000. It's just saying how many years into the future, it's an estimation of future cash flows. Well anyways, recurring business-- if you don't.

Have recurring, then you You can't sell it for as much of a multiple.

Well, yeah, because recurring companies are valued on the top line, on revenues. So instead of, you know, like let's say you had $1,000 in revenues, 900 in expenses, and $100 in profit. And a five multiple on earnings would be only 500. But when it's a recurring revenue, a lot of times it's valued on the top line. So five times a thousand is it's 5,000 versus 500. that it's 10 times the valuation. But beyond that, you may not ever be looking to sell a business or something, but it frees you from stress, which leads to the next one, which is Evergreen. Evergreen. Now, there's a lot to be said, this one especially, it's worth a caveat, that there's a lot to be said for the power of a launch.

Yes. And something comes out, the anticipation. Yeah, yeah.

You know, movies, they do huge launches, right? Artists know more about how to do that. You can request a free call and we do human to human old school like we want to just talk to you, we want to get to know you, we just want to hear about your dreams and then we'll share with you what we maybe see and how we can help and maybe we can help and maybe we can't and either way is fine. fine, but we love this and we spend time with a lot of rich, famous and influential people and we're learning a lot and we've got a lot to share. So we'd love to kind of talk to people about that.

So on the brand call, which you guys can go to lewishouse.com/brandcall and right there you'll see the form to opt in if you want to do a free call with Rory's team on this. What will they gain from that to call. They'll learn more about how to build their personal brand and how to be more influential, all those things, right?

Yeah, I would say give them a.

Kind of a breakdown based on what they're sharing, their goals, their vision.

Yeah, yeah, I would say do big tours. Authors, right? We do the book launch. One is our team will help you get clear about what your personal brand really is and what it should be and sort of what kind of direction you're heading. And then two, We'll share with you what we see for you and a lot of people do product launches and stuff.

I mean, the awareness out there, the attention, the buzz.

Yeah, but a launch is very stressful.

A lot of energy.

It always is.

And if you live and die by a launch without having the rest of this after.

As a potential next step or next steps for your words, that's a hard business. Yeah, you're just, you're always like, you're either going into a launch or in a launch, you're coming out of it. your personal brand. And there's, you know, almost everything that we share and teach is stuff that we have learned from other people. We've learned it from you, right? Like, I've been through seven-figure webinars and I've been through Snowball Launch. The nice thing about Evergreen and recurring is like, okay, we're building a steady snowball and it's like we can, you know, breathe a little bit. We can love on our people and not always be, we could take care of our existing customers and not always have to just be thinking about selling the next one, right? So, I love Evergreen and I've been through all sorts of stuff that we've learned from lots of people. So, a lot of it we're sharing from people that we have learned but I think what we're really passionate about is that reputation piece. -That's it. -And keeping you green.

-Yeah.

-So, there's time to do a launch and the one thing I will say about this is it's almost like there is this breakthrough point that you need to do a launch At least one big launch to break authentic and congruent and aligned.

-Yeah, there's a real need for this.

Because there's a lot through and then sort of become known. And then once you're on the other side of that, you can sort of, you know, chill out a little bit. -And then the last S there is scalable. -Is scalable.

-You know, I have the greatest mastermind where we got a lot of big influencers and people who have large audiences but also don't understand where they're heading. You know, they got too many opportunities. They don't know what their uniqueness is. They haven't figured out their revenue stream.

I'm looking for things that are infinitely scalable. That they dreams.

And so, I think it's really important if you're if you're wanting to build a business or build your personal...

They will grow and you don't ever get capped. Right.

Right?

So if I'm, if I am, I don't know what is an example of something that's not scalable, but something that's really just really, really hard.

Brand or launch any product or service, go to lewishouse.com/brandcall all lowercase and you can learn more there and at least just jump on a call, learn more about where you're heading.

Really, really big is, it takes a lot of energy. It's just not super scalable. So, you always want to be thinking.

What can I systematize so that I can duplicate over and over again? It's going to be really helpful to jump on this call. So, I would check that out for sure. We'll link it up on the Shunpik, right?

Yes.

And scale it up.

Well, and if you are building a.

Personal brand, as well, I want to ask you two final questions because we got to wrap things up. This one is the three truths, which I think you You might have answered last time.

-I have answered.

-Yeah. -We're gonna do it again.

I'll save on the question. -And like a lot of you listening, if you're in that space of going, okay, I want to build a personal brand, then what do I do or how do I make money at it? It's kind of a one to many. You're trying to figure out a way.

Well, here's an example of something that's not scalable.

-And just let you go into what are your 3 truths. -Man, I always forget to prepare you doing one-on-one phone calls. -Yeah, that's not It's not scalable. It's not scalable. You can only talk to so many.

So many hours. Scalable to a point.

I know they're coming.

So, this is if it's your last day and you have no more, no one has access point and then it's not. Right. So, scale it up to 10 hours to your content or information anymore and all you could share with them these three things that would be lose a day.

Yeah, like however many hours you want to spend doing. that's going to create, it's going to create a, you know, it's going to lock down your cap.

Yeah, exactly. Left behind. What would you say are your three truths? I would say, so again, to repeat that, these are dares. This is what everyone should be thinking about in running the perfect business.

We think this is the future, yeah.

The future. Something that's digital, automated, recurring, evergreen and scalable. And obviously physical goods is eliminating that. So if you have, I wish I.

Would have figured out in my life earlier to stop serving myself and start serving others sooner. And it's just like you just don't feel any type of fear when you focus on others.

-Mance or clothing or beauty products, it's not digital.

-Yeah. Now, and here's the thing. I don't know that I found any business that hits all five of these. So it's more like what's the most that you can hit?

Yeah, yeah.

But you know, like- Try to do.

As many as you can.

As many as you can, yeah. So like vitamin- it all goes away. So I would say that. Yeah. Vitamins, okay, a good example. So the nice thing about vitamins, anything that's a consumable product- It's recurring. Is recurring by definition.

You can automate the process of it.

But both, I would say the second thing is play the long game. Play the long game. When it comes to your reputation, when it comes to your money, when it comes to your relationships, when it comes to what feels good, play the long game. And then for me, the third thing is I just, it's a... Selling it and delivering it, right? You can have people on a monthly auto ship.

You can have Evergreen, you can scale it up.

It's a faith thing, you know, and I hope you don't mind me sharing, but it's just like... And it can scale pretty nicely.

It's not digital.

So, four out of five. It's pretty good. It's pretty good.

It's pretty good. It's pretty good. And so, you know, you look at...

A membership site is probably a digital membership site is probably one that fits this, right? Digital membership sites do fit this. The channel for me, it's I'm a Jesus guy and I'm a Christian guy and I, you know, I believe in his plan. I believe that it's going to work out. I believe that this, the story has already been written and it's just believing that the challenge with membership sites is, is the recurring keeping people in. It's keeping people in. It's like, yeah, they stay 3.4 months or whatever.

It's finding that, like, whatever that is that people need to stay in for, which is usually adding, like, a software component or something else or helps them.

Or A human touch.

Human touch or a physical good. Or a physical good that's not digital anymore.

Yeah, or an experience like a community experience, like a live event. Like a live event or some future is going to be better than the past. And however that looks like for you. You know, for me that's Christianity and Jesus, but whatever, whoever you are, that's another thing you should at least spend more than a little bit of time getting clear on. is what you really believe about the long, long term. Yeah. The real long term. Absolutely. And just believing, that's the thing that I think winners definitely have this inherent belief that the future will be better than the past. Right? You get free tickets to the...

Which is no longer digital, but that's pretty much... Yeah.

You're going for as many as you can. You're going for as many as you can. You're going for as many as you can. And part of this is all of this is all of these are vehicles, these are all vehicles. for you to be more of who you were designed to be. That's it.

Yeah, that's great man. I love those three truths. I gotta acknowledge you my man because you've... And again, if we're thinking about building a personal brand with DARES, it's like for me, by going through this process, I learned more and more about my uniqueness and my uniqueness is not At this moment at least, it's not helped me so much get clear on my vision and it's my goal to serve as many people as possible. And you've given me that clarity through this brand strategy, but also our friendship has been really powerful and I know you're constantly helping us, managing and building some massive team. And me in the weeds of managing people all day long, it's about the relationships, building relationships with other influencers, creating great content, speaking, whatever it may be, doing those things, promoting a message and trying to help the masses. And so, I show as many people as you can who are influencers make an impact with their reach and their audience as well. So, the ability to give people clarity and clear structure is a game changer. So, I acknowledge you for that, man. Appreciate you.

Well, I appreciate it. It's an honor to associated with your reputation. It's not something that we take lightly.

-Yeah.

Yeah.

Appreciate it, man. Final question. Be building a business or a product that requires me to do things that isn't my uniqueness.

-That'S what we talk. That's what we kind of uncovered. Yeah.

-And bringing in other partners or team members to help manage and facilitate those aspects of the product or services that we're doing. And I think that's... What's your definition of greatness?

-I I'm gonna go with, and I know people have shared this before, I heard it from John Maxwell. He said that greatness is when the people who know you the best respect you the most. And I, you know, as much of.

A, it's important for everyone in order to go through this process.

Whatever your staff is, like whatever your team is, should support very specifically what your main thing is. And then everything else, you should either get a referral, you should just get a referral partner, right? Like affiliate commissions or referral partners, that's a great thing. Or just have people you trust that you recommend or you just say no. That's the other thing is you can just say no.

-Because like you said before, the bigger your reach gets, the more opportunities to make money. that, you know, I could create a t-shirt line, a shoe company, I don't know.

-You could, you could launch a restaurant right now. -A soap company, a restaurant.

-You could start a real estate company. -Anything, right? You could start lots of different things and go into that. But you have to ask yourself, well, what is your passion as well? -Right. -Your expertise and your passion, do they lie into those things? Just because you can do them to.

Make money, should you? And is that going to pull you away? -Public world as it is, and there's a lot that I've been through in the last few years and just with social media and everything, right? Like everybody sees this manicured image of who you are, even if it's your weaknesses, it's still your manicured weaknesses. It's the ones you're choosing to share. And I think the reality is that there's only a handful of people around you that really get to see you in your darkest moments, in your weakest moments, and when those... From the deeper.

Focus that you have. And I think that's the challenge. The bigger your audience gets and the more success you can have, there's opportunities to partner with lots of different things and start all these products and services. And what you're saying is to partner with people as referral partners and just work off of a commission or affiliate deals or something and not do those things. Let someone else do them. Or just say no completely and focus on your lane. Did you say want to say something else to that?

No, that is spot on. Is the confidence to be able to say no.

And I think we should go into what business are you in, which is the revenue streams. Have we talked about that yet?

Not really. So that was a good one. So that's one of the exercises that.

And this is an exercise that anyone could do right now at home.

Yeah, this is a great one.

If you've got a pen and paper.

I mean, all these are pretty like you could.

You could do all these.

Theoretically.

But if you want to do this one, you essentially just write down a list of all the revenue streams from top highest earning.

Those people that know you the best respect you the most. I think you've reached greatness. Love it.

Rory Badian, my man.

You want to create a real transformation in people's lives, they have to invest something, they have to give something there. But I also say, since you're so smart and you know everything, you don't need to make money, can you show me one major influencer, thought leader, person you admire today? One. Show me one who hasn't focused on building their brand and business.

It's a lowest earning, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. So this is one that you know, you just basically go revenue, you just revenue streams at At the top.

Yep.

And just you just brainstorm them. So, step one is just what are.

All... -Speaking books, courses, events, whatever.

-Membership.

Yeah.

Blah, blah, blah.

You know, whatever.

We sell t-shirts. Like whatever your revenue streams are. -Just write them all down.

-Just write them all down.

Okay?

And then what you do is you do two rankings.

-Oh, this is great. There's one through five, right? -Two rankings. -Oh, this. I forgot about this. This is the key. Oh, my gosh. -The first ranking, is which one is the largest. And so, a lot of times people will say, oh, I'm in the XYZ business. But when they do this exercise... -The.

Speaking business or the book business.

-The revenue tells a different story. It's like, oh, you say you're in this business, you might even present yourself...

-Say you're a speaker, but really you're in the events business or the book business. -The book business. -The book business.

It's getting crazy.

It's all good.

Yeah.

So that's the thing. It's figuring out the revenue stream and figuring out what business you're in based.

On the actual dollars.

Exactly.

Just the results. Now, everything we've talked about, we probably should have said this earlier. Everything we've talked about today happens in the context always of who you are now and also who you want to be. It's what is your current bio. Right. Like, you know, how can you package yourself to to be perceived as an expert today and then it is what is your... Where do you want to be? What is your future bio?

So, the business you're in right now may be based on the highest revenue that you have, the revenue stream but it doesn't mean that's where you need to be.

I mean, it doesn't... Long-term. Yeah.

But you need to be clear.

You need to understand where you're at. Today. Right. And a lot of times we don't and we don't operate accordingly. We think to ourselves, you know, this is the... And this is all inspired to me by the McDonald's story. Of course, I've heard this before. It's like classic MBA school story is they say, you know, I guess it was Ray Kroc or someone was talking to a business class and Ray Kroc asks the class, what business am I in?

And they're like, hamburger business.

Yeah, I'm in the hamburger business. Restaurants. And, you know, and he goes, no, no, no, no. And he says, how many of you can make a better hamburger than me? And they go, well, yeah, of course, yeah. I can make a better hamburger than McDonald's. And he says, that's because I'm not in the hamburger business. I'm in the real estate business. And he was really clear that's like we're in the real estate business and McDonald's owns real estate on all of the most popular street corners in the world, right? I mean that's, but on the surface, now on the surface it's fine if people think you're in one business.

Perception.

It's fine if the perception is that as long as you are clear.

And your reputation needs to be that we create great hamburgers.

Yeah.

Or we create a great family experience or whatever it is.

Whatever the reputation needs to be or whatever your reputation actually is is what your reputation is. But you need to make sure that your reputation is aligned with what business you're really in. Yeah. And you either need to adjust your reputation or adjust the revenue stream. Now here's the part, it's the second ranking though that's where everything is like crazy. is all you do, okay so you have your... -You rank your revenue stream. -Revenue, yeah.

So, you rank them here. -And the highest revenue stream is actually the business that you're currently in based on revenue. -Just data. -Just based on that. -Tops. -Doesn't mean that's where you want to be.

It's based on where you're at now. -Yep. -And then the second ranking is... -Is stress. It's the stress ranking. And so all you do is you go each revenue stream and you rank them. And you go, okay, on a scale of one to five, five being incredibly stressful, like, I hate doing this. And it is, it's horrible.

Sucks the life out of me.

Sucks the life out of me.

I dread it. It's exhausting. I lose sleep over this. Everything.

Yeah, it ties up our money or whatever, like, just gives you stress. And a one being, man, this is amazing. It's life-giving. I enjoy it. I love it so much. And you just, and that's a one. And you look at what is the stress level. And what's crazy is a lot of times you find that the highest stress things are producing some of the lowest revenue.

You're like, why am I doing this?

Why am I doing this?

Yeah.

Makes no sense. But we do it because we think we're supposed to. We do it because everyone else is we're doing it. We do it because our colleagues are telling us we need to do it. We're doing it usually out of insecurity. Out of insecurity to just trust and believe and jump blindly and boldly into risking just being the person we were meant to be.

That's good. It's really good. So revenue streams was a big one for us when we did this session for the two days because it helped me gain clarity on where I'm at, where I want to be, and the things that create a lot of stress. And saying, you know what, maybe we don't have to eliminate them right now because some of them are making good money, but how can we start transitioning out of them and create a deadline by when I want to remove these things completely by increasing the revenue on other things so that I don't have to worry about the revenue on something that's creating a lot of stress.

Stress.

Right. And that has given a lot of clarity for me and my brand and my team to be able to move forward in things that we do better anyways than things that were just stressful because we thought we were supposed to do them. So that's a really key one. You guys can do this at home.

Well, when you do all this, and this is one of the things, and this is again, I hope you don't mind me sharing this.

Go ahead.

You know, you called and you came to Nashville and we spent a couple days together to try to get clear on like what's the thing you should be all in on? And we talked about all of this different stuff that you were doing. And at the end of our two days together, our great big epiphany was that the one thing that mattered most was what?

The podcast.

The podcast. And the podcast wasn't in the conversation really of like, what are, it was like, this is your deal. Like, this is the thing. And Louis, you have spent money on Facebook ads for lots of different things in the past, but you shared with me that you had never once spent $1.

Promoting the podcast.

Promoting the actual podcast itself.

Well, maybe we can spend a couple dollars testing boosting a post, but yeah. Yeah. To be an integrity network.

But compared to other things, Right, I haven't spent much.

A few few bucks.

And what's interesting is it's so it's like, you know, like the podcast isn't necessarily your top revenue stream. Right. But once we got clear about your brand DNA and who you were designed to be and then and part of...

And that's why I wasn't focusing. I mean, it's still a major piece of everything but I didn't think it was the business I was in because I was generating revenue and other things. So we'd spend money on those other things to make more but really like you were saying there, go ahead and finish your... Well, what I was just...

Yeah, what I was just gonna say is when you get clear on your brand DNA and like this is your thing, this is... And look, you part of how you know what your thing is because it's the thing that's working. Like it's the thing that's working without.

Having to try, without having to spend money on it. And it's the thing that's making everything else work.

Yes, it's like the keystone. It's the cornerstone of everything. And then you go... If you go you all in on that thing, you don't have to worry about the money. You know it's going to show up and especially you just being as heart driven and heart led as you are, you were just like, I don't even care what the revenue streams are. I know they're going to show up and you just, that's a faith and a trust that you have that if you serve people... And here's the thing about money in general. And I'm not the world's expert on money but I grew up with none of it. and then got some of it and have learned over time how to get more of it, is money is just simply the byproduct of how much value you deliver in the world. And so the fact that you are delivering tons of value without charging for it on the podcast, it's your reputation. It's the reputation formula. It's like the results times reach equals reputation. You're having huge reach and So the revenue shows up as a result of building a reputation. The revenue shows up. It may come in different ways. But it's, you know, and I just, it's one of the things I love about this generation, like speaking of millennials and Gen Z and like some of the younger folks is I feel like one of the bright spots of the future is that people aren't as motivated by money in these upcoming generations. They're really motivated by just what is fun and what is cool and what makes a difference in the world. And there's some negative parts of that, right? But there's some really beautiful parts about that too, is to go, you know what? Money is not going to cause maybe as many people in the next generation to compromise as it has caused people in previous generations.

Yeah. See, man, there's a lot more that I know we could talk about, like brand mantra and everything else that we haven't covered here, which is, you know, we did a two-day breakdown, which was super powerful. And you've been doing this for a lot of other people. And I asked you before we jumped on here, if there's something we could give to people listening or watching on, on YouTube or on video.

Yeah.

And you said that you wanted give a free strategy call, 30 minutes maybe more, to a brand strategy call. Is that right?

Yeah. So, Brand Builders Group. So this is the business that we are in. And AJ and I are partners and we've got some other people on board. We are helping people establish, build their personal brands. We're helping them build rock solid reputations and then we're helping them become rich, famous and influential. influential after they've built rock solid reputations. So, if you want to know more about how to do that, you can request a free call and we do human to human, old school, like we want to just talk to you, we want to get to know you, we just want to hear about your dreams and then we'll share with you what we maybe see and how we can help and maybe we can help and maybe we can't and either way is fine. But we love this and we spend time with a lot of rich, famous and influential people and we're learning a lot and we've got a lot to share. So we'd love to kind of talk to people about that.

So on the brand call, which you guys can go to lewishouse.com/brandcall and right there you'll see the form to opt in if you want to do a free call with Rory's team on this. what will they gain from that call? They'll learn more about how to build their personal brand and how to be more influential, all those things, right?

Yeah, I would say give them a.

Kind of breakdown based on what they're sharing, their goals, their vision.

Yeah, yeah, I would say one is our team will help you get clear about what your personal brand really is and what it should be and sort of what kind of direction you're heading. And then two, we'll share with you what we see for you as a potential next step or next steps for your personal brand.

There you go.

And there's, you know, almost everything that we share and teach is stuff that we have learned from other people. We've learned it from you, right? Like I've been through seven figure webinars and I've been through SOGA and I've been through all sorts of stuff that we've learned from lots of people. So a lot of it we're sharing from people that we have learned, but I think what we're really passionate about is that reputation piece. That's it. And keeping you authentic and congruent and aligned.

Yeah, there's a real need for this because there's a lot of, you know, I have the greatest mastermind where we got a lot of big influencers and people who have large audiences but also don't understand where they're heading. You know, they got too many opportunities. They don't know what their uniqueness is. They haven't figured out their revenue streams. And so, I think it's really important if you're, if you're wanting to build a business or build your personal brand or launch any product or service, go to lewishouse.com/brandcall all lowercase and you can learn more there and at least just jump on a call, learn more about where you're heading, your vision, it's going to be really helpful to jump on this call. So, I would check that out for sure. We'll link it up in the show notes as well. I want to ask you two final questions because we got to wrap things up. This one is the three truths which I think you you might have answered last time.

-I have answered, yeah.

-We have, we're gonna do it again. I'll save on the question and just let you go into what are your three truths.

-Man, I always forget to prepare for these. I know they're coming.

So, this is if it's your last day and you have no more, no one has access to your content or information anymore and all you could share with them these three things that would be left behind. What would you say are your three truths?

-I would say, I wish I would have figured out in my life earlier to stop serving myself and start serving others sooner. And it's just like you just, you don't feel any type of fear when you focus on others. It all goes away. So I would say that.

Yeah.

I would say The second thing is play the long game. Play the long game when it comes to your reputation, when it comes to your money, when it comes to your relationships, when it comes to what feels good. Play the long game. And then for me, the third thing is I just, it's a faith thing, you know, and I hope you don't mind me sharing, but it's just like for me, I'm a Jesus guy and I'm a Christian guy and I believe in His plan. I believe that it's going to work out. I believe that the story has already been written and it's just believing that the future is going to be better than the past. However that looks like for you, for me that's Christianity and Jesus, but whoever you are, that's another thing you should at least spend more than a little bit of time getting clear on is what you really believe about the long, long term.

Yeah.

The real long term.

Absolutely.

And just believing, that's the thing that I think winners definitely have this inherent belief that the future will be better than the past.

Yeah, that's great, man. I love those three truths. I gotta acknowledge you, my man, because you've helped me so much get clear on my vision and it's my goal to serve as many people as possible. and you've given me that clarity through this brand strategy, but also our friendship has been really powerful and I know you're constantly helping as many people as you can who are influencers make an impact with their reach and their audience as well. So the ability to give people clarity and clear structure is a game changer. So I acknowledge you for that man. I appreciate you.

Well, I appreciate it. It's an honor to be associated with your reputation. It's not something that we take lightly.

Yeah, yeah, appreciate it, man. Final question, what's your definition of greatness?

I'm going to go with, and I know people have shared this before, I heard it from John Maxwell. He said that greatness is when the people who know you the best respect you the most. And I you know, as much of a public world as it is and you know, there's a lot that I've been through in the last few years and just with social media and everything, right? Like everybody sees this manicured image of who you are, even if it's your weaknesses, it's still your manicured weaknesses, it's the ones you're choosing to share. And I think the reality is that there's there's only a handful of people around you that really get to see you in your darkest moments, in your weakest moments. And when those people that know you the best respect you the most, I think you've reached greatness.

-Love it. Rory Vaden, my man. I appreciate you.

-You want to create a real transformation in people's lives? They have to invest something. They have to give something there. But I also say since you're so smart and you know everything, you don't need to make money, can you show me one major influencer, thought leader, person you admire today? One. Show me one who hasn't focused on building their brand and business.